Over the past decades Japan has established itself as top rated when it comes to safety. The country's propensity to earthquakes has given them an especially acute awareness for building standards and construction codes. The devastation caused by the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami clearly would have been orders of magnitude greater if these efforts had not been put into place. Much has been learned from this event and the country is focusing on improving their process of handling the aftermath and relief efforts for similar events. These efforts, in the past, have a huge strain on resources, communication and relief organizations.
One of the challenges in assessing the devastation has been to try and establish the human death toll and, when possible, reconnect survivors with their closest akin. To that end, a group of non-for-profit agencies, primarily funded by groups like the Anime USA and Katsucon, have come together to implement a general purpose Human Reconnection and Identification System (HRIS). Their primary goal is to be able to design, develop, construct and deploy a generation of smartphone-based identification mobile units (IMU). These IMUs would be used by volunteers and rescue personnel assisting on the ground during the aftermath of a disaster. These units will be connected via a provided smartphone and attachment utilizing satellite internet to connect to a central server for data aggregation and further analysis. Among other things, the HRIS will facilitate: the upload of images (taken by the operators) from survivors and deceased; provide a means to input individual's key information and aid in future identification of these individuals and their location.
Clients will be able to manage and configure the IMUs prior to use and subsequently monitor their location via a central station deployed at an operations center. They will be able to monitor the information as it is being received, retrieve previously stored data from the system; examine and print or map the information pertaining to any of the IMUs or selected locations. The systems should also allow for expanding the number IMUs and diagnose their status remotely. The users will start with your general solution and be able to configure the product to meet their specific needs.
As part of the HRIS, it is important that you software be able to also run autonomously and potentially aggregate the data for batch upload in situations where the network connectivity is lost for indeterminate period(s) of time. The system should have the capability of ensuring data integrity and prevent from data losses. Depending on capacity, it can be assumed that once the information reaches the central station it may potentially be discarded on the IMU.
The requirements for this system are given in the list below as desired features for the overall system. The list is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It is up to your team to develop a list of features that best fit the defined scope of your application.