Connected Products in a Crisis

In 2011, Hurricane Irene became the storm that reminded many families along the East Coast how it felt to be without power.  In that situation, connected products like smartphones became the lifeline to ask for help and to find out when the lights would come back on. 

The FEMA Blog posted in January of 2011 about Random Hacks of Kindness, in which volunteer coders develop applications to meet challenges of humanity.  They have gone on to create apps that connect refugees and aid agencies, people with excess food and too little, families and victims of emergencies, and others. 

M2M and the Axeda Platform in particular are fertile ground for innovation in crisis management.  Intelligent devices can prevent emergencies or minimize their damage.  Imagine your smoke alarm from home texts you at work that it has detected a gas leak.  In a bad accident, a connected car notifies the local authorities and summons an ambulance.  The Fleetster app provides an example of monitoring the locations of vehicles, such as municipal police cars, which can then be dispatched to the scene more quickly.  The capabilities are already here.

How would you create an app that could save lives?  Learn more at http://developer.axeda.com .