Code and documentation for a mobile app as proposed by Goutham Karthikeyan, Marc-Andre Chavy-Macdonald, Budhaditya Pyne and Hiya Roy in their paper, "Space-based Disaster Risk Management by Location-based Emergency Shelter Awareness and Training (LESAT)", 68th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Adelaide, Australia, 25-29 September 2017.
Disaster strikes. Often with no warning. But what if there is warning? Do you know where to go? Do you know when to go there? Can you get there even if you had no warning? Ideally, you seek refuge even before disaster strikes. But can you believe the warnings?
All of these questions are much more life-and-death in the developing world. Even if you are lucky enough to survive uninjured, the economic aftereffects can ripple for years, dimming your life prospects and the lives your loved ones, and much more so when you are forced to escape with no preparation.
LESAT is a proposed mobile app that can help people cope better with disasters, through increased awareness of disaster risks and through training in what to do when disaster strikes, BEFORE disaster strikes.
LESAT is initially targeted for the Philippines, a nation with frequent disasters of great variety: typhoons, mudslides, flooding, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. An advanced industrial democracy like Japan, with its high GDP per capita, and high political cohesiveness, copes with an almost identical range of threats very well. The Philippines is poor, its government agencies aren't as well-funded or as well-regulated, and its political cohesiveness is not as strong, with some regions even pursuing autonomy arrangements. (We might add "urban warfare" to the threat categories, in view of insurgencies fought not just in the mountains, but in Zamboanga and Marawi.) In this, the Philippines matches the description of much of the developing world. Other regions (in particular East Africa and the tropical Andean nations) suffer from a similar range of disasters. Why the Philippines especially?
For an app to be developed in Japan for humanitarian uses in the developing world, the Philippines is in fact a very reasonable priority among the plethora of nations that match the same governmental, economic and emergency criteria. It is roughly time-zone-aligned with Japan, which makes communications and coordination easier over the phone and by internet. The Philippines is not far from Japan, which reduces the cost of face-to-face, ground-truth coordination on the app's requirements. Even in Japan, there is a good basis for understanding, since Japan hosts a large population of Filipinos (relative to other nationalities represented), and relations between the two nations (despite past troubles) seem to be strengthening. In recent years, this strengthening can fairly be described as very dramatic in the area of capacity development for the Philippines' space program. Perhaps the best evidence for this is in the fruits of the cooperation between that program and several Japanese universities with excellent reputations in engineering: the Philippines has put up several small satellites with Japanese help.
In some longer run, the Philippines may even be able to serve its own satellite remote sensing needs with its own engineers. In the meantime, however, Japan-Philippines cooperation in space helps cement the relations between governments, their space agencies, and the relevant quarters in academia in both nations. The problem is how to establish the relationship between these intergovernmental efforts and any true benefits for a disaster-beleagured population, in the minds of that population. It's in how make a concrete connection between space-based disaster-related management information and the deployment and coordination of local resources for disaster risk management. This is where LESAT comes in.