Pressure ® Real-time Crisis Navigator

Real Time

Monitoring twitter allows Pressure to discover issues real-time by watching for activity spikes, no more waiting for the news. No more waiting fo the State Department to update their sites. Pressure gives you the alerts sometimes hours ahead of other information outlets.

Context Aware

Pressure knows your current location and the potential location of any activity and will give you phone numbers, directions and travel times to the nearest U.S. Embassy. It also gives you news and twitter feeds to keep you apprised of the current situation.

Easy to Use

Available on all types of devices, Pressure works to keep the information simple, relevant and in context. This allows the user to quickly and easily notify their emergency contacts and see where threats might be. Putting the right information at your fingertips.

Beth Partridge -- LinkedIn
Beth Partridge
Product Manager

Kevin McClanahan -- LinkedIn
Kevin McLanahan
Product Engineering


Al Arsenault
Project Lead

Rohitha Bhushan -- LinkedIn
Rohitha Bhushan
Product Engineering
Martin Neuhard -- LinkedIn
Martin Neuhard
Product Design

Finding yourself in a crisis situation in a dangerous, unfamiliar place can be truly terrifying. There is a large development community in place in Africa carrying out a myriad of humanitarian programs. There can be tens of thousands of foreign nationals on the ground there on any given day. Acts of terrorism, political unrest, disease outbreaks and natural disasters are not uncommon there. Seven of the ten most dangerous countries in the word are on the African continent. Once an afterthought, travel industry experts confirm that traveler safety there has become a primary concern in the last few years. Several applications have emerged in an attempt to address these risks. Some offer news and alert services, while others focus on location tracking and notification but they all have one thing in common: they are based on information obtained from news outlets or governmental organizations that can lag an actual event by precious minutes or even hours. None of them provide any on-the-ground condition visibility.

  • No Information
  • Limited News
  • Multiple languages
  • No directions

Contextually aware information can lead to better crisis situation outcomes.


PRESSURE® Real-Time Crisis Navigator stands alone. Currently implemented as a mobile-optimized web app, it is only real-time application designed for panicked travelers on the ground. The heart of the tool is an early warning system based on Twitter stream. Machine learning algorithms process the Tweets to identify the threat and locate hot spots on the ground. An embedded SOS function instantly notifies emergency contacts and transmits traveler location information at a set interval. Local emergency resource contacts are embedded for instant access and everything is integrated with Google Map navigation functions, making it a truly powerful navigation tool.

Processing

The Twitter “Garden Hose” is connected to the free Twitter API that allows access to a subset of about 1% of the tweet stream for a given area. This twitter stream output is filtered by latitude and longitude so that only tweets that originate within the continent of Africa are collected. Tweets are loaded using Streamparse and Storm into a PostgreSQL database on an EC2 instance on AWS.

  • 50x50 Grid of Africa
  • Geolocated Tweets
  • 7 Day Moving Average
  • Creates a Tweet Spike

Alerts are triggered when a spike passed 500% of the moving daily average.

Display

The user interface relies heavily on Node.js, D3, Bootstrap and the Google APIs. The combination of technologies allows us to pinpoint accuracy of danger and directions to safe havens in order to avoid danger.

  • Node.js
  • D3
  • Google APIs
  • Google Custom Search Engine (for news)

Geolocated alert size is correlated to percentage increase in tweet activity..

erts and location allow the traveller to make more informed decisions..


Next Steps:

  • Convert to smartphone app with push alerts and badges
  • Implement full Twitter Firehose for exact locations and better event ID
  • Implement travel companion location sharing and communication
  • Embed Google Translate functions to process foreign language tweets and enable emergency communication
  • Additional training data for Neural Language Model
  • Accumulate training data to implement Neural Language Model for event better event ID and filtering of true crisis events

Pressure continues to strive for advanced notification and safe passage for its users and those around them. Each new release adds functionality with safety in mind.


Please check out the working application, on your smartphone, laptop, desktop or tablet. We are always interested in improving this application, so please contact us with comments!