Motorola: Cellphones could offer a unified disaster alerts broadcasts
Motorola envisages using cellphones for emergency alerts even if most of a cellphone network is down; a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast
A recent patent application by Motorola offers an interesting idea in which first responders would be interested: Cellphones could sound the alarm in the event of a disaster and pass on the alert from phone to phone — even if most of a cellphone network is down. In an emergency, such as a hurricane or terrorist attack, the U.S. government can operate the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which harnesses all TV and radio frequencies, to broadcast warning messages to people in their homes. “Unfortunately, a large portion of the intended recipients will not have their TV and radio systems turned on when a disaster occurs,” says Motorola engineer Jerome Vogedes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the U.S. patent application filed on 21 May.
His answer is a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast. A phone on the edge of a disaster area, where a cellphone service still operates, receives the alert. It contacts the nearest phone using Wi-Fi, establishes a P2P network with it, and sends it the alert. That cellphone then does likewise until as many mobiles as possible have received the alert.
This way, the warning message gets out with “minimal use of infrastructure”, Vogedes says.
