PhoneGuard: a smartphone in the coalmine

Abstract

In the short span of less than a decade the mobile phone has become a ubiquitous feature of life in India. Everyone from the chai-wallah to the CEO has a cell-phone and in recent years many of these are smart-phones capable of running smart-apps. Our focus is on conceiving a practical and useful app that can aid in disaster prevention and actually implementing and testing it. Towards this end we created PhoneGuard -- a smart-app that converts the phone into a remote monitoring device -- you leave the phone in a sensitive location like on the banks of a river or inside a coal-mine and it periodically takes pictures, does simple image analysis and checks for coherence over time, if warranted (e.g. in case of flooding of the river or buckling of beams in a coal-mine) it raises an alarm and follows an escalation procedure to push live images to a webpage. A complete working system was developed using standardized software and tested using realistic conditions. We believe that the image analysis and its integration into an escalation procedure is a novel aspect of our system.