Growing up in a remote area of Washington State, developer Kenji Kato was accustomed to wildfires. But it was the devastation of the 2014/2015 wildfire in Washington State that moved him to action. That fire burned within a half mile of his parents’ home.
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When the forest talks
Emergency Info Guide uses IoT to track wildfires and their paths
“One of the things I realized very quickly in seeing these wildfires is that information and data and communication networks really kind of fell apart,” Kato said. “So, that was an onus for me to really start thinking about how can I get information out to first responders in a very short amount of time.”
Kato developed the Emergency Info Guide, a small, low-cost IoT weather station. The connected sensors can gather precise meteorological information from rural areas like forests and send real-time updates to firefighters. This helps first responders track the movement of wildfires and stay out of harm’s way.
“The nature of these fires is that they’re growing so fast that they eliminate most people’s communication networks,” Kato said. “Having something like the Emergency Info Guide concept, where they automatically form a network and provide this backbone for communications and information, is kind of an essential element that’s missing in a lot of these areas right now.”
Emergency Info Guide won the 2019 Call for Code 42 School Hackathon, which is supported by the IBM Code and Response initiative. Get involved to help society deal with the growing issue of natural disasters.