Five days after Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippines, victims are struggling to survive as relief efforts have trickled aid down to only an estimated 1 in 5 people on the ground. As the U.S. military began round-the-clock operations today to deliver aid to Tacloban, a city of 220,000 that was largely destroyed in the storm, local officials blamed the slow distribution of food, water and medical supplies to a breakdown in law and order.
In large scale relief efforts, another problem is gathering and processing the data that will allow aid workers to identify who needs help urgently. We’ve discussed how technologies such as those developed by “crisis mapper” Patrick Meier who used the world’s new nervous system–social media–to pinpoint where victims needed help during the devastation in Haiti following a massive earthquake.
At the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, UN Global Pulse director Robert Kirkpatrick asks a similar question in the following video: “can we understand what’s happening to vulnerable populations in real time?”
Using Mobile Services as Crisis Sensor Networks from The Human Rights Center UC Berkeley on FORA.tv
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