Disasters around the world have spurred on technology to increase the importance of them. With the Haiti earthquake, many were homes were destroyed, communication was lost, and lives were taken as well.
Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen who is a researcher at Flinders University in Australia, created technology to help reach out to those in affect from the Haiti earthquake. With tents, water, and the main items needed to survive, planes dropped over 1,000 solar powered lanterns that were attached to chargers for your mobile devices. This allowed communication amongst the people even though there was no network coverage. Peop
le were allowed to send text messages, make calls and send files.
With the Haiti earthquake, projects have been born to help situations like this one.
Tera (Trilogy Emergency Relief Application), is a program that allows a person to realize when a major crisis has come about and able to send a message of 140 characters to every phone user in that given area such as flood warnings, or any natural disasters, medical help, shelter, etc. This was invented due to the Haiti earthquake.
To me its crazy to think that something that we use when we go camping or if the power goes out, can be used to help survival of a country. I never would have thought that a simple lantern could impact lives so much. Its good to see that we have this new technology not only for the gadgets, but surviving a purpose and saving countries.
It is awesome that they are working to help the people who really need help. I like the quote in the article by Dr. Gardner-Stephen that said "There's plenty of technology for rich white men. It's the rest of the world that we need to help." It is certainly true, as I have seen in my mission work in Uganda, that the majority of the people in the world who really "need" technology do not know how to use it. It is great that people like this man are helping make technology easier to use for the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great example of how the advancements of technology are being used for a good purpose. A lot of new technology really does not have much purpose to it, but to see that it is being used in a way to help people survive is very cool.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the area, many people are faced with rebel militias, coups, etc. that steal away children and murder their loved ones.
ReplyDeleteThe technology could not only help the victims of disasters, but also those subject to humanitarian crisis'.
Heart to Heart International also has a water filtration system. The cool thing about these humanitarian efforts is that there are many solutions. We can use a ton of different methods to help solve issues.
ReplyDeleteI think this is an area that people neglect to think about being able to benefit from using technology. This is the industry I want to go into so I think that the quicker people are able to be notified, identified, assisted, and their normal life restored is worth creating technology to advocate for it. Many different water filtration systems exist. Tide has trucks that act as laundry stations, lots of technology has recently been created to help out these kinds of organizations.
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