Skip to content

2014 Student Design Competition Winners Continued to Develop Their Work, by Si Sun

Si Sun, the author of this post, is a student volunteer at #ASIST2015.

Our student design competitions winners from last year continued to develop their work and presented a poster at the Annual Meeting yesterday.

Krista Parham (left) and T. Zachory Frazier (right)

Their winning design, called Disaster Box, allows people to use social media to help with disaster relief. This is possible with the deployment of Disaster Boxes, a set of boxes with the capacity to process wireless signals.

These boxes are positioned at a certain distance from each other and creates a wireless communication network. Any devices with wireless communication functions can connect people to others in the area, including rescue teams and other people experiencing the disaster.
The unique value of the Disaster Boxes is that it allows people to still connect to each other when all means of established mobile communication is down in a disaster situation. This connection enables the delivery of critical information that can save lives and give people hope.

You can find the Disaster Box team at the Annual Meeting to learn more about their interesting and important ongoing project.