Designing a Safety Confirmation System that Utilizes Human Behavior in Disaster Situations

This paper introduces a use case to discuss how to design services for disaster situations as well as to elucidate the development and evaluation of our safety confirmation system, which utilizes human behavior in disaster situation. The success of the safety confirmation system based on information sharing among evacuation centers depends on the inter-center movement of humans. In order to know whether the safety confirmation service would work effectively or not after a massive disaster, we conducted a survey that examined how many evacuation centers were visited after the East Japan Earthquake and the periods over which the evacuees visited the centers. As a result, we confirmed that many evacuees were still visiting centers 72 h after the earthquake, making our technology effective in responding to a disaster.