INNOVATION May-June 2015

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post-earthquake procedures and ACT 45 wind-and-flood damage procedures so our people aren’t carrying two sets of field manu- als and forms.” The standard procedure for Rapid Damage Assessment is to send trained staff out into the field with clipboards and paper forms to fill out. Teams might go out for up to 12 hours to assess damage and come back to the office to drop off stacks of paper. Then all reports would be manually entered into a spreadsheet. “This step involves hours of data entry,” said White. “It causes a real bottleneck in the recovery process.” Last fall, UBC accepted the Real-Time Building Damage Assessment proposal and assigned adjunct professor Dr. Michael Wrinch, P.Eng., FEC, to guide a team of engineering students with BC Housing and NSEMO as co-sponsors. “Each year I take on eight groups of students and provide industry expertise on these capstone projects,” said Wrinch, who devotes one day a week to UBC and also runs his own engineering company, Hedgehog Technologies Inc. “The students involved in capstone are 4 th year students who are ready to make a difference in the world. They’re in tune with leading-edge technology and very comfortable with cloud computing concepts and writing phone apps.” Capstone students learn how interact with the client, read the scoping document to get specific details of what the client wants, and then synthesize a solution. The student team comes up with a technical plan and a series of options they’re consid- ering, and get ongoing feedback from the client. They establish a timeline for what they can achieve in eight months. That’s all

the time they have because the project has to be completed before graduation. The UBC team was comprised of Chen (Steve) Zeng, an electrical engineering stu- dent and three computer engineering majors: Sittipol (Phil) Tribunyatkul, Kit Meng, and project leader Natasha Kumar, who is plan- ning a career as a computer game designer. “One of the first things we did was to take BC Housing’s four-hour course on Rapid Damage Assessment to get a handle on how the paper-based data collection system oper- ated,” said Kumar. “What surprised us was that no one had already built an app for this, given today’s technology.” The goal of the project was to develop a functional mobile application to collect RDA reports and create a platform to manipulate and export collected data so it can be used to coordinate support and recovery efforts and determine which buildings to evacuate, and where displaced persons can go. The system needed to allow data to be viewed on a map and exported to a spreadsheet. “Because this app may be used after storms and earthquakes, Professor Wrinch pointed out the importance of designing a robust system that could work offline if cell phone service was down,” noted Kumar. “So we created an offline storage capability on our mobile application. You punch in data but if it can’t be sent right away, you can compile and store the infor- mation on your smartphone. When you’ve done your inspections, you go back to the emergency centre where they have a secure internet. There you can submit all your data for immediate use.” The Real Time RDA tool has two components: a mobile application for field

FROM TOP: Left to Right: UBC students Phil Tribunyatkul, Kit Meng, Steve Zeng and Natasha Kumar with Bill White and Steven Bibby of BC Housing, Mike An- drews of NSEMO, and Dr. Michael Wrinch, P.Eng., FEC, UBC adjunct professor. UBC engineering students Phil Tribunyatkul and project manager Natasha Kumar work at the Emergency Operations Centre during DamagEX. Bill White (left) and Steven Bibby confer during the DamagEX trial of the new app.

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