With Disasters striking all over with people flee, In the urgency of earthquake, floods and hurricane. The relief organisation spring into action and dispatch people and resources to affected areas. But where do they go to find the people who have fled and need help? Today, relief workers rely on aerial surveys, eyewitness accounts, or manual head counts at shelters to estimate where people affected by the event have moved. But it takes a while for people to be tracked down, and often, the techniques are not comprehensive. There is a new way of tracking people using cell phone data A new way of tracking people using cell phone data from the moments before the disaster could help target appropriate relief efforts at the right locations, in the crucial 12 hours after an event. “Affected people often move–and it becomes very difficult to deliver the right amount of supplies to the right places,” Linus Bengtsson, one of the creators of the method.
That’s data that they collect routinely, Bengtsson and his colleagues at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Columbia University have come up with a way to quickly and reliably mine that data and use it to estimate how people are moving.
