Smart-phone battery-life short-fall in disaster response: Quantifying the gap

Smart-phones are useful in disaster response. However, they have limited battery life, and during disaster situations, there may be fewer opportunities to recharge them. The result is that the endurance of a smart-phone on a single charge may become a limiting factor to the utility of smart-phones in such circumstances. None of this is controversial. However, and perhaps because of this, there has been little effort invested into understanding how often the limited battery life of smart-phones becomes problematic during disaster response, or further, to understand what an appropriate battery life of a smart-phone should be, to avoid this problem occurring in the typical case. In this paper we relate the results of a survey of emergency responders and other private citizens to explore these questions. The results show that there is a clear short-fall in the battery life of smart-phones, which typically operate for only around one day before requiring recharging, being only approximately half, or 15 hours too short, of the endurance required, depending on the measure applied. We explore the potential for bridging this gap using various mechanisms.