Towards Context-Aware Messaging for Emergency Situations Alaa Almagrabi ¹Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering La Trobe University Melbourne, Australia ²Departments of Faculty of Computing and Information Technology King Abdulaziz University Jeddah, Saudi Arabia aoalmagrabi@students.latrobe.edu.au Seng W. Loke and Torab Torabi Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering La Trobe University Melbourne, Australia s.loke@latrobe.edu.au t.torabi@latrobe.edu.au Abstract—It is widely accepted that an information system which provides warning messages in the context of emergency situations is useful. However, managing services such as sending warning messages to an identified location is a difficult task. This paper presents a methodology that receives and distributes warning messages during hazards or emergency situations by using our proposed Mona Emergency System (MES). MES Contextual information includes user defined location and information about the danger type, status as well as point of interest details used to support the rescue process. Keywords: context-aware messaging, emergency systems, context- aware computing I. INTRODUCTION Emergency systems refer to the measures that we put in place in order to help us effectively deal with disasters within society [1]. Modern technology such as remote sensing with the use of wireless devices increases the chances of detecting slight changes in the environment. The use of modern technology in disaster management simplifies decision making, saving time and availing help where necessary [2]. Context-aware computing begins over a decade ago in such work as [3]. They described context as location, nearby people and objects, and changes to those objects over time. After comprehensively reviewing a range of context-aware applications, we define context-awareness in applications as the use of any information related to the user’s situation in order for the application to proceed and perform a task. The contextual information used might be extraordinarily diverse such as the areas of concern (i.e., spatial zones), the user model or profile, environmental factors (e.g., wind, or rain), the surrounding area and locations of computing devices and their users [4]. Contextual information can be used as an alternative to old fashion addressing techniques such IP addresses for communication purposes [5]. Furthermore, context can be categorized into user context, physical context and network context [6]. For a system to be context-aware, the system has to apply context to provide appropriate information and/or services that depend on user’s task [7]. In addition, context-awareness must consider the user’s state and surroundings, and must adjust its behaviour based on continually updated context information [8]. A user’s context can be quite rich, consisting of attributes such as physical location, physiological state (such as water temperature and heart rate), emotional state (such as happy, worried, or quiet), personal history, the identities of people nearby, locally recognizable objects and actions, daily behaviour, and so on. Furthermore, such dynamic context information has to be sensed in real-time. Context-aware computing applications examine and react to a user’s changing context in order to help promote and support people’s interactions with each other and their environment [9]. The contribution of this paper is to propose an approach that addresses the problem of contextual addressing and messaging for people in danger. The approach enhanced messages sent during emergency situations using our prototype, which we call Mona Emergency System (or MES, for short). We apply the use of contextual information to assist the rescuing process such as location, status and type. The MES provides a new way to describe the message receiver using spatial relations via the use of structured English expressions using words such as “near”, “far” and “next to”. The paper gives a brief overview of the Mona Emergency system concept and design, including MES’ system architecture and the contextual information model. In addition, the paper includes the message structure and examples that utilize that message structure. Finally, some snapshot is presented of MES implementation in outdoor environments in order to demonstrate the concepts. II. MOTIVATING SCENARIO The Mona Emergency System has a design that enhances the flow of information that will be transferred to the actors within the system; for instance, spatial relations are used to determine relevance of messages. Moreover, the system offers controlled English expressions for specifying destinations of