First responders have awesome tools. But in tough situations, even common folks need to help.
After what happened in Myanmar, we need something like this that works properly.
It has only been tested in controlled environments. It can also be improved; I know BLE is not _that_ effective under rubble.
If you have any feedback or can contribute, don't hold back.
Would be nice if the readme included the current method to detect disaster and the nature of the "SOS" signal. Is that something Bluetooth has a behaved protocol for, or is it really just chirping?
+1, I usually have it off, but toggle it on when I'm in a bad setting. It can be made more accurate with time, especially with onboard ML models.
It is a Bluetooth protocol (BLE Scanning and Advertising, if you'd like to learn more about it).
I'll be sure to update the readme. Thank you for the great questions!!
Yeah, false positives are the largest problem. The barometer sensor helps reduce them, but it's not available on all phones.
Machine learning can help a lot here, but I haven't looked for publicly available data yet.
Well thought out. Excellent work. Thank you for making this available as open source!
Side note -- I wonder if it's possible to have a companion system to scan regularly for the signal at home for the elderly. Then notify caregivers from the companion using available wifi/cell if the SOS is detected. Since it's so well behaved it seems like even having a regular wellness check mode would be possible. Having a companion system for relay would allow the app itself to never need WiFi/cell and have independent care notifications protocols that wouldn't need to be maintained in the app.
That's a really cool idea. Kudos!! A companion system should be relatively easy. It's also two single devices communicating with each other which makes things much simpler to build as well. This is worth looking closer into.