The exploration of alternative phone charging strategies for disaster or emergency situations

The battery life of most mobile phones is insufficient to enable their effective use throughout a disaster or emergency situation, without requiring recharging. Therefore in this paper we survey and classify a number of strategies that can be used in either disaster response or for people living beyond the reach of ubiquitous reliable mains electricity supply. In doing so, we aim to make available the wisdom of those who have had to face the challenge of finding alternative mobile telephone charging solutions, so that other practitioners may benefit from this. We present a simple methodology and results for a sample of mobile telephone charging products and techniques to their allow meaningful comparison and assessment, and limit our sample of solutions to those readily purchasable, with the intention of making our findings realistic and directly actionable by disaster response practitioners.