Competence-based mobile Community Response Networks

The exploitation of mobile social networking technologies merging crowdsensing systems enable mobile users to opportunistically create participatory mobile social networks based on not only common attributes, interests or contacts, but also mobility-related context, such as physical location and co-presence. Disaster management and mobile healthcare applications can benefit from the possibility of creating participatory communities based on physical closeness. Co-located people can dynamically form ad-hoc mobile community response networks (CRNs) to provide anywhere and anytime care assistance to users with critical physical/behavioral conditions after a disaster occurrence or even during their normal day-life while on the move. The effectiveness of mobile CRNs depends, however, on the possibility to select among co-located users the ones with the most appropriate competence to understand and execute required assistance actions. The paper introduces the concept of competence-based mobile CRNs and describes how competence-based mobile CRNs can be created within the specific framework of a crowdsensing-based middleware called COLLEGA that provides comprehensive management functionalities for supporting prompt assistance in emergency situations. In particular, the paper discusses our proposed competence model and its implementation within COLLEGA enabling to extract the competence of mobile CRN's members from data available on social networks, such as LinkedIn.