During disaster(s) there is high chances of people getting displaced or lost. We wanted to create a broadcast transponder system using existing infrastructure to basically broadcast signals and locate lost people on basis of received echoes.
During time of disaster we propose to use either a swarm of drones of helicopters to broadcast high power radio signals in a specified frequency over and accross the affected area. Devices such as mobile phones, radio transponders or anything that can receive this signal would then transmit back and the broadcaster would be able to detect incoming pings and thereby locate people.
- Radio broadcasters
- Used to send broadcasts at a specific frequency and pickup distinctive response signals to locate people
- Radio devices/transeivers
- These are present with the people
- Can emit distinctive pings.
- Can pickup broadcast signals and can emit responses.
- Central server
- This is what we want to implement
- Co-ordinates broadcasts and pings
- Maps pings to an approximate geography
- Co-ordination between different broadcasting teams
- Insights wrt total area covered by to broadcasts
- Can include additional capabilities to call for backup among others
- Communication can also happen accross this channel.
Our idea is something similar to finding a lost aircraft by using tranceivers which can capture the disctincive pings of the black-boxes. In our idea the aircraft are people and the black-boxes are radio devices which can emit distinctive pings or emit "response" signals to emergency broadcasts.
We plan to use the already existing infrastructure like radio tranceiver present in any basic mobile phone, etc So no need for new hardware or complex adoptation process. We feel our solution would be effective irrespective of literacy in using technology. The presence of a powered radio device would suffice. Our solution would not necessarily require internet, or mobile signal which might not exist during calamity period.