Personalizing disaster alert applications to fit the individual user could dramatically improve civilian preparedness in events like the Wednesday earthquake that devastated central Italy, according to an Israeli research team.
“There are many applications that give early warning for terrorist attacks, missile attacks through smartphones,” Eran Lederman, head of the Relevant Design for Disaster Research Group at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
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Lederman is the principal investigator of the Personal Essential Package Capsule project, which aims to make alert information for natural disasters more accessible to the civilian population.
While a host of smartphone applications exist that alert users to events such as earthquakes, the PEP Capsule project hopes to optimize their effectiveness by personalizing their output based on parameters like user age, geo-location and emergency training background.