Smart City Technology for Disaster Management: Demonstrating the Use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons for Emergency Alert Dissemination

Alerts and warnings are intended to educate the public and keep them safe in an emergency or natural disaster. Historically, public alerts and warnings have been delivered mainly via broadcast media and roadside signage. However, deploying these signals is time-consuming and they may not be noticed by people who need them. With the increasing use of smart devices and other technological advancements, the nation's alerting capabilities must be upgraded to target vulnerable sub-populations more effectively. An easy-to-deploy, automatic alert/warning system with no need for a line of sight would be useful. To this end, we developed Insight – an alerting system that detects signals from Bluetooth beacons indicating danger zones [1]. It requires no Internet or communication infrastructure and thus, it is robust to communications failures during catastrophes. Here, we demonstrate the use of the Insight mobile application and the underlying ad hoc Beacon infrastructure.