A mobile/cloud emergency response application for indoor assisted living

In this paper, we present IPSOS Assistance, a cloud enabled mobile application for indoor assisted living in case of emergency situations in indoor environments. Such an indoor emergency response application is aimed at giving people assistance in case of personal and environmental emergency (e.g., showing available escape routes in case of fire), taking advantage from the social contribution of other people located nearby in the same building. Our cloud-enabled approach frees the mobile application from directly managing the interaction between nearby users, furthermore, the social contribution enables to maintain contextual information up-to-date, such as users location and state of points of interests (e.g., exits, stairways, lifts, fire extinguishers, etc.), as well as to provide assistance to a multitude of users within an indoor space. We discuss challenges and lessons learned on developing such a kind of application.