Lost In The 'Maddening Crowd'? Searching For Your Family? Excellent Searching App For Lost People 'RapidFTR'

By Sridhar Sharma | INN Live

RapidFTR (rapid family tracing and reunification), an app that processes information about missing children in disaster situations, is helping to reunite families. Imagine a flood strikes, filling your house with water and washing you away from your children; or waking up alone in hospital after an earthquake has hit your home; or getting separated from your loved ones after the panic caused by an airstrike. Electricity is affected, the phone lines are down. How do you raise the alarm?

Unicef, the UN children's fund, has a solution: RapidFTR. The brainchild of a New York student, RapidFTR is an open-source app designed to reunite children with their families in rapidly developing disaster situations.
Using android phones and laptops, the app enables humanitarian workers to register information about missing children, which is then uploaded to a database accessible by those responsible for child welfare. The quicker children are found, the less vulnerable they are to violence, exploitation and trafficking.

RapidFTR was trialled in a Congolese transit refugee camp in Uganda and, most recently, in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan swept through the country.

Of the 3.5 million people displaced by typhoon Haiyan, 1.5 million were children. Within days, Unicef organised a team to travel to the areas most affected. They set about training Filipino police officers and social workers to use the technology, while those already familiar with it surveyed the scale of the problem; a meeting with governors and officials responsible for child welfare followed. At that point, the Unicef group struck lucky: the governor of Tacloban, a technology buff, offered his team of programmers to provide technical backup. They were due to travel to Manila to pick up a programming prize before the storm hit.

Training new people to use the tool took a few days, but by day 10 they had found their first missing child, a severely disabled four-year-old separated from her parents. By the following day, they had documented nine more children. It may seem slow, but the idea is that if local staff can be trained up, they will be able to use the technology more quickly in the future. To date, they have documented 70 children, prompting the government to commit to using the app on a longer-term basis.

The Philippines app team needed 200kg of equipment to support their effort, which includes 20 androids, four routers and 10 laptops. Cary McCormick, a RapidFTR specialist with Unicef, says a reliable power supply can be one of the biggest challenges in disaster areas. The team carries solar packs and power clips, which connect car batteries to USB ports wherever they go. In future, Unicef wants RapidFTR to become a standard tool in emergency supply kits.

Unicef says one of the main advantages of the app being open source is that it can be used and adapted by different teams on a range of different platforms. The central data system means that a range of cases, such as those involving children, vulnerable families or women at risk from violence, can be tracked over time. It could even be used in place of traditional birth registration.