<div dir="ltr">Somewhat similar utility to what Brian said:<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 1:00 AM, Brian Wilson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brian@wildsong.biz" target="_blank">brian@wildsong.biz</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
They are targeted at "hospitality and healthcare" industry. They are<br>
just WiFi phones, no GSM no Linux.<br>
Both of these apps have staff that are constantly moving around and<br>
don't have a desk phone.</blockquote><div> </div><div>Similar scenario, on which I am working right now, is "Disaster Management" and "Relief Operations" and supplementing these activities using the FR.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
Build an app that caters to these folks and adds together WiFi + GPS + GSM<br>
</blockquote><div>For Disaster management, Sahana is a FOSS web application just made for this purpose which has been used in real world situations. Building a solution that caters to the similar needs of Disaster reporting and data collection could well be very effective and useful for such critical solutions, with such a handy and powerful device.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
For a hotel -- from the phone, check status of any room. Use the phone<br>
as a master key for cleaning staff.<br>
</blockquote><div>The central Sahana server can keep track of On Field relief workers, broadcast them instructions or alerts based on their GPS location. Like, need to relocate and assign a different task ?<br>Or say, urgently address a situation at a nearby location e.g. a victim who needs immediate help.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>
When a phone leaves the building (loses WiFi VOIP registration) switch<br>
to GSM and note it in the server.<br>
</blockquote><div>This is a very kool thing to have, ideally we can communicate to the Sahana server over Wifi, GPRS, and SMS too. I wrote the SMS server side part, which i am still expanding.<br>So you could just have a daemon running, which sends the GPS location of the Field Reporter, via an SMS in a timely manner. Acting like a real time GPS tracking for Sahana's system keeping track of all volunteers.<br>
<br></div><div> Moreover, there is currently a new module in development, by Dominic on the Sahana project, which is the Dead Body Tracking and Disaster Victim Identification (in short: DVI) for Sahana. This would include body search on the scene, one thing you would preferably carry a GPS-enabled handy data input device and a hand full of labels with you .The module should be enabled to mark found items on a scene map, e.g. a grid, that's what the search team usually does.<br>
The phone, could well be used for such a purpose, if it had a camera too, it could take pictures. And an app to generate Bar codes for each body. Later it can be connected to a printer to print the bar codes and fix them on the bodies.<br>
<br>Just few more possibilities to the list :-)<br>I am working on this project, which aims to use the FR as an effective Disaster reporting tool for Sahana, a FOSS Disaster management system [<a href="http://www.sahana.lk">www.sahana.lk</a>].<br>
<br>GPS, Wifi are key hardware components to start off for this, and later we can use the other modes like SMS, GPRS to exchange data between the Sahana server and the phone using a client application.<br><br>Providing the field volunteers with an easy to use, touch input based phone to do all the data activity saves a lot of hassles and increases effiency thus saving time. An important *thing* in such situations..<br>
<br><br>Regards,<br><br>Ajay Kumar<br></div></div></div>