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Emergency and Technology

Ishikawa National College of Technology

1. Why did we research the emergency contact system ?

N: Hello, everyone. Today we are here from Ishikawa National College of Technology to talk about improving the Kosen emergency contact system.

K: Before we present, we would like to say we are sorry to hear about the people who've suffered from the tragic earthquake and tsunami last March. No one could have expected such a disaster would take place; destroying so many houses, schools, and lives.

N: Please take a look at this picture. These are from high school students in Hawaii. I was there as an exchange student during the March disaster. After hearing about the earthquake, a lot of students of my school wrote many messages to Japan. They also told me they were praying for Japan and wanted to help us. We really hope everything is getting better and the people who have suffered from this tragedy will get their smiles back again as soon as they can.

S: Now, let us introduce ourselves. The three of us are all majoring in electronic and information engineering and studying in our second year. This is Natsuki Katsuizumi, and this is Haruka Niwa. And, I am Nahoko Suma.
Our research has three stages. First, how did we come up with this research project ?

N: Second, how do Kosen emergency contact systems work ?

K: Third, how can we take advantage of our findings ?

K: First of all, let us talk about how we came up with this research project.
One day, last winter, we had no school because of a sudden heavy snow. At that time, no quick way was available to get information from school. All we had was a call tree. Each student was supposed to contact a couple of their classmates in the case of an emergency. The problem with this system was that the last person on the tree was not able to receive the information in an efficient manner. For that reason, we came to think that we needed to get accurate information from school more efficiently.

N: Last year, our school, "Ishikawa Kosen" introduced Gmail into our school as the way to quickly deliver information to students. Each student has their own Gmail account and we get emergency messages sent from the school directly to our　cell-phones by registering our email address.
Thanks to the newly introduced Gmail system, we can receive emergency information faster and more reliably than before.

K: At our school, owing to Gmail and our cell-phones, we get information from school much easier. How about other Kosens ?

2.Questionnaire to Kosens

S: We asked three questions to six Kosens. The questions were:
No1. Do you allow students to use their cell-phones at your school?
No2. How does your school deliver emergency information to students ?
No3. Does it work? Or not?

S: They gave us various answers, but for the question No1. All the Kosens we sent the
questionnaire answered they allow students to use their cell-phones at school. We also asked these questions to thirteen public high schools in Ishikawa Prefecture.
As you can see from this pie chart, almost no public high schools allow students to use their cell-phones at school. This means Kosens have more options for an emergency contact system than public high schools do.

N: Now let us look at two examples.
Case1,T. Kosen.
T. Kosen encourages its students to register their own contact addresses by sending a mail to a designated address or by turning in a registration form. Students can choose cell-phone, home-phone or fax. But still there are some students who do not register their contact addresses and who are not able to get emergency messages because of filtering systems which protect the users from harmful e-mails on their cell-phones. We can see this registration system works for some students, but not for all.

K: Case2, K. Kosen.
In the case of K. Kosen, they display a red banner on the top page of their official web site and recommend the students to check it out when they think there might be no school or no classes. But the students need to check the banner by themselves.
In addition, an exclusive server of their system, sends emails to the students, their parents and the teachers all at once.
The percentage of students who can receive messages from the emergency contact system is still only about sixty percent because of the filtering system on many students' phones.

N: We have just talked about two examples. But we learned that there were many Kosens using the different ways. Because of incomplete registration of student's contact addresses or problems of filtering services, not every student can receive emergency messages.

S: But even if it is so, the school must figure out the way to let us obtain the urgent information as we have just mentioned. Each Kosen's emergency contact system has both good points and weak points. So we have to develop better system, combining the good points and making up for the weak points. To improve our school's emergency contact system, we believe the school should display urgent notices on the school web page.

3.How can we take advantage of this research?

K: We've talked about the Kosen emergency contact system. Now, how can we take advantage of this research? You know, in Japan, it's not unusual to be struck by typhoons, earthquakes or heavy snow. As it happens, people in the disaster area need to get necessary information accurately and quickly. And we think if we make better use of the emergency contact system so that people get important information quickly, it might lessen the damage and possibly even save lives. Since we are all majoring in electronic and information engineering, we have come to think we are responsible for creating a better system, which is easy to use and is inexpensive for our future.

N: Last year, there was an unforgettable earthquake in Tohoku on March 11th. At that time, a lot of people used the social networking services like mixi and Twitter in order to give and receive various kinds of information and they were very helpful. But a lot of wrong information also spread around, which made many people very confused. The accuracy of information is as important as its quickness. For both people who give and receive the information, it is necessary to confirm if the information is accurate or not.

S: We have learned a lot out of our research into the Kosen emergency contact system. We would like to make use of the findings of our research project to contribute to the development of an emergency contact system for the society. Although the technology of giving and getting information has been developing steadily, there are still many people who don't have a way to get information because they are not technologically oriented. But when something wrong happens, especially in an emergency, everyone wants to and has to know about it. And also emergency information has to be provided to everyone.

N: As we mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, you know, emergency contact has to be fast and accurate. It is important to develop a system that can help everyone in various ways, depending on users and situations.
We must keep it in mind that there are people who are weak in this information society and we will develop truly reliable ways of an emergency contact system for every single person in the future.

ALL : Thank you for your kind attention!!