Those who provide aid to the most vulnerable populations are increasingly risking their own lives and safety. From 2000 to 2016, the number of attacked on aid works has increased in 150%. Clearly, a novel and innovative approach to tracking and decision-making is needed.
The aim of better protection and more efficient and effective operations can only be achieved by developing technologies along with the policies for their use. Hence, process and technical innovation must be combined to achieve the aims of better protection and more effective and efficient operations. It is therefore imperative to develop a human-centred technology approach that can take into account the actual real world practices of responders, and incorporate these into the core technological designs and developments. In a recent DevEx publication, three key areas have been identified to improve protection:
1. Real-time information from the ground
2. Strong systems for implementation and security
3. Multiple layers of monitoring and verification
The aim of iTRACK is to answer to these needs by building a next generation, intelligent tracking platform, based on a privacy-by-design approach, to provide better protection for civilian humanitarian missions and to support collective decision-making and coordination in disasters. The iTRACK system will pursue a threefold purpose of (i) identifying threats and issuing real-time warnings; (ii) improving coordination of responders by secure information sharing and live decision support; (iii) providing logistics functionalities such as navigation, routing, scheduling and inventory management. To this end, the system will capture real-time information streams from distributed sensors and location & tracking devices, communicate and share it via secure channels, and integrate and process it in real-time. Policies, guidelines and best practice will be embedded into the system design and functionality, enriched with open datasets and open source software.
To achieve this goal, iTRACK will foster organisational and technical innovation during disasters for safeguarding civilian responders during critical scenarios from inaccurate, distrusted, and overhyped information. To this end, iTRACK will aim to raise the awareness of risks and threats at both the operational and headquarter levels by providing them with accurate, validated, enriched, high quality, and actionable knowledge. Decision-making will be assisted by automated methods for real-time, intelligent processing and linking of information from multiple sensors and devices. Multiple end users such as WFP, and iMMAP will be directly engaged throughout this process, including a working group of early adopters of the iTRACK prototype.
