Add us as your preferred source on Google to see more of our content in Search.
Add to Preferred SourcesA mobile mapping app that draws on crowdsourced data to help humanitarian responders find people in remote areas is being rolled out by the medical charity Doctors without Borders (MSF – Médecins Sans Frontières).
Finding people fast in an emergency, whether an earthquake or disease outbreak, can make the difference between life and death. Better knowledge of West Africa could have helped tackle the 2014 Ebola epidemic faster. MSF personnel told, that the app has helped them locate people even during urgent missions – but needs work to be more reliable.
Launched last year, MapSwipe gets citizens to put together detailed maps of areas where existing geographical information is basic. It draws on the open-source platform OpenStreetMap, and is part of the Missing Maps project designed by MSF and partners to ‘put vulnerable people on the map’.
“MSF has already deployed MapSwipe in a few field sites, including urgent missions such as Aweil city in South Sudan. The app could effectively ‘shrink’ the area that needed detailed mapping from the initial site of 5800 sq km to the 690 sq km that proved to be inhabited. Results from South Sudan and Madagascar show that about 90 per cent of the crowdsourced data agree with each other — an indication that citizen feedback is reliable. But in some cases users disagree with each other, which is limiting the app’s ability to guide field staff,” Benjamin Herfort, from Heidelberg University in Germany.
The app works by supplying satellite imagery to volunteers who signal, through their phones, whether they recognise features, such as buildings, which are proxies for population. The app team aggregates this input to produce maps that reflect features on the ground more accurately.
Source: SCIDEV. Read full article here.
26 May, 2017