The Goal

To create a portable, opensource tool for the Android platform to aid search and rescue efforts by allowing the transmission of data between users and to central servers.

The Challenge

Imagine you are a rescue worker searching for victims and survivors in the aftermath of a hurricane or other natural disaster. Or, imagine you are botanist mapping a geographical area for an invasive species. Or, an environmental scientist searching for hazardous waste deposits.

What's needed is a portable tool that is able record information about Finds and transmit it to a central server or control center. As mobile phone technology becomes ubiquitous and more powerful, such a tool is now feasible. Building such a device on the FOSS Android platform would make it widely and freely available to rescue workers, environmental scientists, and other field workers.

The POSIT Project

The POSIT project is part of the The Humanitarian FOSS Project, an NSF-funded effort to get undergraduates engaged in building free and open source software that benefits humanity. It began as an undergraduate research internship with Prasanna Gautam (Trinity, '11) during the spring 2008. The Google Android platform had just been released in October 2007. Using Android emulator software, a first prototype was designed and built during the 2008 Summer HFOSS Institute.

Thanks to the generous contribution of some G1 developer phones by Leslie Hawthorn of Google, work on the phone itself began in spring 2009. A fully functional prototype was demoed in at the May 2009 ISCRAM Conference in Gothenborg, Sweden. During the 2009 Summer HFOSS Institute, a team of students from Trinity College (Gong Chen '12, Christopher Fei '10), Wesleyan University (Qianqian Lin '11), Connecticut College (Phil Fritsche '11, James Jackson '11, Khanh Pham '10) and University of Connecticut (Antonio Alcorn '10) incorporated additional functionality into the prototype.