Spatial Awareness

Touch a village

From the Neolithic Revolution to the Information Age whereby the world is being wrapped in a blanket of sensors IoT Internet of Things. The dilemmas of life remain fragile for a huge portion of the world's population. Natural Disasters, wars, and famine are barometers for the health of our planet, its population, and its citizens. We depend on the planet for life and depend on its inhabitants to care for it and for its citizens. As the population grows so do the issues. How can we effectively manage resources and deployed them to address issues'. No resource is infinite and choices have to be made; human choices are required. Artificial intelligence could be employed to sift and highlight data, decision trees could be build to determine the allocation of resources and subsequent engagement.

One tap saves a family

The creation of integrity checked GeoData is critical to the success of Non-governmental Organisation missions. MSF UK's Mapswipe and HOT's Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Tasking are applications created by two NGO's to enable crowd-sourced satellite image classification. Both applications allow registered users to download satellite imagery and classify artifacts of interest including buildings, roads, and other environmental infrastructure.

Mapswipe was easiest to use and contribute to as it application design is focused for input limited use, and employs swipe input as much as possible as can be seen within the promotion and tutorial video.

The use of gesture swipes and tap combinations are key to the usability of Mapswipe.
Another key element of Mapswipe is the feeling of contribution, as you complete mapping assignments a user's progression is continually updated. The Mapswipe team has included achievements to keep users engaged with the application and continue their contributions. As users feel more rewarded their engagement with the app and continued use will increase.

The costs associated with acquiring each new user should decrease as the number of referrals increase. Interestingly the ability to share from the app with others is in the main menu, it may be interesting to add this as part of the mapping screen where users are expected to spend most of their time.

After about five minutes of using Mapswipe, there was a real sense of achievement, and it's very clear how the next achievements will be unlocked. As you swipe map tiles from right to left the realisation grows as to how important each swipe is. The impact of each swipe and how the gesture of one user can become the receipt of life altering aid. All this is achieved through the power of touch and by being spatially aware micro-humanitarian.