Working with Germany's civil protection office and research ministry, scientists in Germany have developed an app that makes use of a smartphone's WiFi chip to communicate with other devices in the vicinity which also have the app installed. — dpa
How do we communicate in a crisis situation when you can't get any signal on your mobile phone and there's no Internet connection? Scientists in Germany think they've found the answer.
Working with Germany's civil protection office and research ministry, the scientists came up with Smarter, an app that makes use of a smartphone's WiFi chip to communicate with other devices in the vicinity which also have the app installed.
In open field testing the scientists were able to connect smartphones that were 200 to 250 metres apart. This ad-hoc network can then forward data, for example a call for help, from one device to another until it reaches the target device.
But this isn't just for when your low on mobile data. The use cases range from power outages to cyber attacks to natural disasters.
"Disasters and crises can happen anytime, anywhere, so you should prepare accordingly," says one of the researchers, Professor Matthias Hollik from the Technical University in Darmstadt.
The technology has already been successfully tested in a large-scale crisis exercise, but there's still a long way to go before it's ready for everyday use.
For one thing, the Android smartphones used in the test don't natively support the kind of communication required. "We had to modify them technically and make major changes to the smartphones," Hollik says.
Now that the technical basis has been proven, the scientists say it's up to the phone manufacturers to provide support for it in their devices. — dpa
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