Emergency Management Software for 3 Million Citizens

Excessive pollution in the air, extraordinary meteorological, biometeorological, and hydrological threats have a negative social and economic impact. App development software helps with warns against those events.

First of all, during disasters, the risk of loss of health or life increases. Besides, there is also a high probability of loss on private and public property. For example, the cost of losses after only two floods in Central Europe in 1997 and 2010 amounted to nearly USD 7 billion. To reduce the negative consequences of natural disasters, many countries are choosing to implement an early warning system against threats. Unfortunately, systems are often inconsistent, so their operation is not effective. How can we remedy this?

CHALLENGES

The challenge for our client (GIS Partner) was to rebuild an ineffectively functioning crisis management system in Poland, whose operation focuses on flood risks. The idea was to create and implement the Information System of the Country Shield (Informatyczny System Osłony Kraju – ISOK) – a platform that would collect data on various types of phenomena, e. g. the degree of air pollution, wind speed, excessive rainfall, or the possibility of black ice.

 The system would send a message to the public administration and citizens after identifying a threat based on its integrated database and module of information distribution (which is adapted to most modern devices). Stermedia is responsible for the implementation of the notification module and the regular sending of messages.

The main challenge was to achieve the fastest delivery of information possible via SMS to 2-3 million recipients. Information from the system had to appear simultaneously on the isok.gov.pl portal, where everything is available to the public.

The next results of our programming works are the subscription module, which is divided into:

• territory (poviats, voivodeships),
• type of threats (flood, smog, hail)
• delivery channels (telephone, e-mail, browser type)  

Notifications prepared by Stermedia are sent to phones which support three operating systems: iOS, Android, and (the now-defunct) Windows Mobile. In addition, they also reach the mailbox and appear as a push notification in the browser. If the email provider is unreachable, the message is sent by a backup server. 

In order to increase security and guarantee efficiency in delivering notifications, servers are deployed locally and abroad. Notifications are also available in the browser. To receive them you need to register on the portal, enter your e-mail address and select incoming alerts. In order to obtain more information, you can choose a poviat or province and types of selected threats.