Improving Emergency Preparedness and Response in Rural Areas

The unique socio-economic structure of rural communities makes them particularly vulnerable to emergencies. However, rural emergency preparedness and response (EPR) significantly lag behind their urban counterparts. A key obstacle to timely dissemination of emergency information is limited broadband, which in turn limits agencies' abilities to (i) disseminate preparedness and response information to residents and (ii) coordinate in the face of a disaster. We aim to improve rural EPR services by aggregating information from national, state and county-based sources and disseminating it in rural communities with limited broadband by leveraging first responders' and residents' mobility. To this end, we co-design and develop an emergency smartphone app (EApp) in collaboration with a rural community in New York State. We study EApp's performance in the lab and through deployments, focusing on energy use, required socio-physical interactions and timeliness of information access. Our findings elucidate critical limitations of off-the-shelf Android platforms to support hands-free opportunistic networks. To address these limitations, we design protocols on top of Wi-Fi direct enabling near 100% success rate in peer-to-peer (P2P) information exchange. Our results inform an optimal end-to-end design and deployment of a rural P2P information dissemination platform.