Mobile mining

18 November 2009

Dr Shonali Krishnaswamy

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Information Technology have developed a new application for new generation mobile phones that could speed up emergency response times.

For six years Dr Shonali Krishnaswamy and her team at the Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering have been wrestling with the potential of mobile data mining - where information is collected from any number of sources, analysed and displayed via an individual's mobile phone screen.

The team recently filed a provisional patent for their "clutter-aware visualisation technique", which displays complex, constantly-changing information in a way that is simple and easily understood.

Dr Krishnaswamy said the application had wide-ranging possibilities but the team initially focused on healthcare and disaster management systems.

"Our technique can analyse calls made to emergency services during a wind storm or heavy rains, provide a bird's eye view of where most calls are coming from and then display this information on a map to mobiles that ground personnel are carrying," she said.

"The real-time data and analysis are immediately available to ground personnel, rather than first being transmitted to a command centre and then relayed back.

"This way, personnel on the field and in central command can understand an emerging situation and best respond."

In another example under development, physiological indicators like blood pressure or heart rate could be collected by state-of-the-art biosensors and relayed via a mobile phone to warn supervisors of escalating stress or fatigue levels at the scene of an emergency, warning them when to rotate staff.

Dr Krishnaswamy is now beginning to showcase the application to commercial organisations she believes will benefit from it in an emergency situation.

"The possibilities of mobile data mining are unlimited," she said. "We're just beginning to explore the usefulness of this cost-effective technology."