New app makes emergency calls hassle-free

MANILA, Philippines – In times of disaster, it pays to know where to seek help.

When a team of mobile app developers realized this a couple of years ago, they made sure to act on it.

When Typhoon Haiyan struck the country in November 2013, Gerard Navarro, an Assistant Communications Officer in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), was overwhelmed by the many different emergency hotlines being flashed on television screens, which he thought only triggered confusion on the part of the disaster victims.

It was at this time that Navarro and his friends made a resolve to simplify and standardize emergency calling in the country. Together, Navarro, Ronald Paglinawan, Vincent Cheng, Jerico Ejercito, Rodel Tarroza, Ron Villaraza, and Ria Lu worked to conceptualize an app that will be beneficial to the disaster victims who are torn between the different hotlines they see on television.  

This year, they released a simple solution to the problem – the E-Directory.

‘Hero support’

E-Directory, as the name suggests, is a mobile directory of emergency hotlines in Metro Manila. It is a mobile application through which users could contact emergency services such as hospitals, police stations, and fire departments near their location. The app automatically detects the user’s location and presents the hotline that corresponds to the user’s emergency.

The app functions much like a Speed Dial, in the sense that emergency hotlines are stored in the phone for convenience. Hotlines of public hospitals, police stations, and fire departments from all 17 cities of Metro Manila are stored in the E-directory, so it would be readily available for the user in the event of a disaster.

Essentially, when confronted with a disaster, the user would be able to call the hospital, police station, or fire department with the tap of a finger and without having to search through a list of hotlines because the app already flashes the appropriate hotline for immediate dialling as soon as it detects the user’s location.

The user is also expected to receive a more instant response as the app provides the emergency hotlines of only the nearest hospitals, police stations, and fire departments in the area.

E-Directory, which is also informally called “Hero Support,” makes use of cellular data in auto-locating the user and load in making the actual call. This remains a limitation to the app since the developers do not have network partners yet.

Nonetheless, Navarro is hopeful that he, along with the other developers, could come up with something that’s “entirely free.”

Instructions

Here are the three easy steps in making a call through E-Directory:

1. SELECT LOCATION. Enable location services and cellular data (3G) through phone settings so the app would be able to automatically determine location. For users without cellular data, the location can be manually selected by tapping the dropdown list on the home screen and selecting the city.

2. STATE EMERGENCY. Choose any of the three services – Hospital, Police Station, Fire Station – depending on the situation at hand.

3. CALL. Tap Call Button. This is the big button in the middle, bearing a phone icon. 

The default numbers listed on the app are those of public services. This means that only public hospitals are registered in the app. The directory, however, is customizable, enabling the users to edit and replace the numbers according to their preferences. In this case, users could replace the default hospital with the hospital of their choice.

Here are the steps in replacing a number in the directory:

1. Open the app’s settings by tapping the gear icon on the upper right corner of the app.

2. Choose your city.

3. Once the default numbers for all 3 services in that city are flashed on the screen, you may edit by clicking on the number and typing the number of your preferred hospital, police, or fire station branch.

The app covers the whole of Metro Manila, which includes 16 cities and 1 municipality, namely: Manila, Quezon City, Caloocan City, Las Pinas City, Makati City, Malabon City, Mandaluyong City, Marikina City, Muntinlupa City, Navotas City, Paranaque City, Pasay City, Pasig City, Municipality of Pateros, San Juan City, Taguig City, and Valenzuela City.

While E-Directory only caters to Metro Manila for now, Navarro said the team is planning to expand the app’s coverage nationwide.

At present, the app is available in the App Store for iPhones. But due to popular demand, an Android version of the app is currently in the works.

Reaching out

What sets E-Directory apart from similar apps is its simple and user-friendly interface, which mainly consists of a big call button in the middle of the screen and 3 smaller buttons for the following services: Hospital, Police and Fire Station.

Navarro emphasized the need for a basic user interface in reaching out to all types of users. He further stressed that the less tech-savvy are often overlooked by mobile app developers, pointing out that other apps with the same function as E-directory could get really complicated and difficult to grasp.

“At first, we were contested that this has been done before,” he said

He added: “We saw other apps, but they were so complicated to operate. If we showed it to our mothers and fathers, they would actually be intimidated. That’s why we made the buttons only four.”

But the real problem in developing the app lies not in designing it, but in funding it. Interestingly, while Navarro and his friends generously doled out money from their own pockets to produce E-Directory, they maintained the app free ever since its release.

“It’s a way of giving back to the community. Plus, for emergencies, I don’t think you should charge for helping,” he explained.

E-Directory proves that more than instruments for capturing selfies or photos of fancy restaurant food, the use of mobile phones could go as far as saving lives. – Rappler.com

Justine Hernandez is a Rappler Intern.