System Architecture Diagram 

Context in source publication

Context 1

... is that of the Virtual Blood Bank Project, wherein the system also finds a volunteer from the database; residing in the area of the requester and sends their details to the requester [5]. One such solution is an application called Emergency Alert System (EAS), which sends emergency calls to the social contacts of the requester [6]. These above mentioned mobile systems, while requesting for blood donation; considers only static contact location of the blood donors. Few other solutions like [3] and [7] also register blood donors and show their details to the people requesting for blood help. These above mentioned related work focuses on providing the static location of the blood donors. The above mentioned solutions helps the people to communicate with the blood donors registered in the system based on their registered static addresses and not based on their actual location at the time of need. Also some systems provide the contact details of the blood donors directly to the requester, which may create privacy issues. The main gap in these solutions is that during medical emergencies, it does not take the actual location of the blood donors into account, while searching them. This proposed system fills up this gap by tracking the actual location of the Blood donor(s) and the system locates the nearest donors at the time of need; based on their actual positioning in the required geographical area. The System does not provide the contact details of the donors directly to the requestors but contacts the blood donors on behalf of the requestors; which maintains the privacy of the donors. People after facing any road side accidents are taken to the nearest hospitals and most often blood is needed to save the person's life. Hospitals situated in Indian rural areas often may not have sufficient amount of blood especially for the rare blood groups. [8]. Even in the urban areas, where blood banks are situated, supply of blood of rare blood groups may not be available in abundance [9]. However in both these scenarios, there may be a blood donor of required blood group nearby the hospital but not known to the requestor or the hospital. The proposed system helps a patient’s relative or hospital’s officer to locate nearby volunteers and forward the request for help. The person has to just enter the type of blood group needed in the Citizen’s mobile applicatio n (CMA) and the system will find the nearest volunteers having the specified blood group and sends the notifications to the Volunteers' Mobile application (VMA); notifying the need of blood donation. The System sends notification to only nearest volunteers by SMS. The volunteer’s acknowledgement for the help request is informed to the requestor. The periodic geo- location updates of the volunteer ’s mobile device; helps the system to find the nearest volunteers at the time of need. The system comprises of client and server application wherein client includes applications like Citizen Mobile Application (CMA), Volunteer Mobile Application and web client. The VMA is responsible to send Location updates of the Volunteer, it fetches the distress call from control server; on arrival of distress call SMS, it sends help confirmation notifications to the control server. The CMA is used by the citizens to send distress call for blood requirement and receives confirmations. The control server records the last geographic location of the volunteer, receives distress calls, searches nearest blood donors and forwards help handling confirmation. The architecture of the system is depicted in figure 1. The system first registers the volunteer and citizens into the system. After registering the volunteer, the system will track the location of the volunteer’s mobile device periodically. The citizen can generate a distress call at the time of blood need. The system will get the location of the citizen, based on the current location of the citizen; the system will find the nearest volunteer(s). The system will now send the notification to the nearest volunteers having matching blood group. If the volunteer is ready to help; then the system will show the route to reach the citizen’s (Requester) location. These phases are discussed in length in subsection 4.1 to 4.6. The user needs to register with the system as a volunteer to render help as a blood donor. The Registration process is illustrated in an UML activity diagram shown in figure 2. The volunteer uses VMA to register with the system. The VMA is currently working for Android [10] smart-phones with version 2.2+. It is successfully tested on Samsung Galaxy 3(android 2.3) and Samsung Galaxy S3 (android 4.2). While registering as a volunteer, the VMA fetches the IMEI (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity) number of the mobile device and the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) number associated with SIM card inserted in user's mobile device. The IMEI number will be helpful to identify the authenticity of the mobile device. To keep the system spam free, only one user can register from one mobile number. The volunteer can access the VMA through that mobile number ...