Smartphone Finder: Dedicated to Seeking Victims Under Collapsed Buildings.

It is critical to discover the victims buried under collapsed buildings urgently after a natural disaster. In recent years, people are habituated to carry smartphones always along with them. The smartphones are provided with a feature to transmit the Wi-Fi signals called "probe requests" to connect with access points. This fact motivated us to develop a novel method that can estimate the locations of the buried victims using the Wi-Fi signals. In this paper, we propose a hand-held system, namely smartphone finder that is designed to locate a smartphone under a collapsed building effectively. We present in detail the basic mechanisms, system overview, and experimental results validating the smartphone finder and the proposed method.