What's not clear to me is, who's listening? Like if I install this app and I get buried under a crumbled building and send out the SOS signal... Are there any receivers???

People, nearby, with the app installed who open it during a disaster. That's why it needs to be in more hands.

Ideally, there would be an option to have your phone "listen" in the background and notify you if anyone needs help. I haven't added that yet.

For now: let's say I'm in a neighborhood. An earthquake happens, a building collapses. I have the app installed and I'm fine. So, I open it and I get close to each building and check if there are any survivors under it.

You'll keep broadcasting, until your battery runs out. It's not heavy on the battery, so it can broadcast for a while.

I'll clarify that in the readme.

This is cool! I have been really enjoying using Meshtastic and LoRa lately. It feels like a blessed relief from the toxic swamp of the regular internet. I love pinging stupid radio messages across the bay without depending on any third-party infrastructure. Maybe in addition to the literal rubble of a life threatening disaster we can use tools like this to dig ourselves out from the psychological rubble of the information superfund site we have built for ourselves

TIL thanks for sharing those!

This is great. That said, I think that unless Apple and Google install something like this by default, it won’t get much traction, because you can’t download the app when you really need it, and most people won’t think to download it before then.

I just went through Helene in Asheville last year and it was painfully obvious that our cloud overlords have overlooked the offline disaster use case. Basically, when you’re in a situation where you desperately need technology to help, you’re on your own. I was imagining that tools like this would be great, but without the cloud, I was helpless.

Maybe instead of trying to get users to install this, it could be a proof of concept to show what’s possible, and to say to Apple and Google: install this basic lifesaving tool on every phone by default?

This is something I needed to hear for months. Thank you.

I'll work towards that. I'll need to figure out how to prove the poc is useful.

Apple's "Connect to a Satellite" touches on that, but it's not available for most of the world or on old devices. :|

This is awesome. Technology put to good use.

Can voice be transferred? Message be recorded and rebroadcasted?

What about making the device vibrate SOS pulses. The person at stake might not have the strength to tap or bang, may be able put the phone on a metallic surface and send vibrations?

I appreciate it :D

Those two questions are spot on.

Voice cannot be transferred yet. Re-broadcasting might require a bluetooth meshnet.

Vibrations are a great idea. They are not that battery intensive. They also can be detected by 3rd party tech.

Both were added to the list of ideas. Thank you!!

I haven't done any effort there, because I want to get this into hands.

Do smart phones support "LE Long Range (Coded PHY, S=8)" Perplexity says it can transmit up to a 1km in ideal conditions. Otherwise it's 10-30m indoor.

Receiving signals doesn't. Advertising likely does. So if someone has proper equipment, they probably can identify the signals.

Ideal conditions is likely open spaces with no interference. Walls and concrete lower that as you mentioned.

I'm hoping it can help if people are standing right next to the rubble, whether BLE or the "siren" sound.

I have no guarantees though. I haven't properly tested because I haven't thought of a low cost option yet.

Might be rough on battery life, but perhaps pulsing an SOS with the flashlight?

It is rough, but I like it if it's "toggled" when needed.

If the person doesn't respond to an "Are you conscious?" alert, maybe allow responders to "toggle" certain actions like the flashlight you mentioned.

A meshnet for communicating back-and-forth between devices. Permissions might be tricky though.

Okay, what is "disaster detection"? I'd really prefer my phone not chirp noise over Bluetooth channels if I don't notice and respond to a notification in time.

Would be nice if the readme included the current method to detect disaster and the nature of the "SOS" signal. Is that something Bluetooth has a behaved protocol for, or is it really just chirping?

1. Disaster detection is a user toggle-able option that uses motion sensors to detect extreme shifts. 2. SOS signal is a BLE broadcast along with an alarm-like audio (generated from a sine wave).

+1, I usually have it off, but toggle it on when I'm in a bad setting. It can be made more accurate with time, especially with onboard ML models.

It is a Bluetooth protocol (BLE Scanning and Advertising, if you'd like to learn more about it).

I'll be sure to update the readme. Thank you for the great questions!!

It would be interesting to see if some of the earthquake advanced warning notifications could be integrated too. at least then it would be an "official" warning. seems like false positives would be possible with the device's motion sensors even with an "i'm okay" type of cancel.

I LOVE this. Thank you! Huge +1, even though it's not going to be easy.

Yeah, false positives are the largest problem. The barometer sensor helps reduce them, but it's not available on all phones.

Machine learning can help a lot here, but I haven't looked for publicly available data yet.