Crowdsourced Emergency Reporting for Regional Impact Prediction

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Solution Overview

Problem

Existing systems fail to effectively leverage the connected nature of customer premises to detect and respond to regional emergencies, such as earthquakes, floods, or fires, by coordinating emergency-state reporting across multiple devices to facilitate timely and coordinated remedial actions.

Innovation Solution

A computing system that crowdsources emergency-state reports from multiple customer premises, using centralized or decentralized architectures to determine region-wide emergency situations and trigger appropriate remedial actions, such as utility disconnection or alerting authorities, based on sensor data and geographic location analysis.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If emergency-state reporting is crowdsourced from multiple customer premises, then the reliability of emergency detection is improved, but the device complexity increases

Engineering Contradiction:

Improveemergency detection reliabilityVSAvoidsystem complexity

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The system divides the emergency detection function into independent sensor units distributed across multiple customer premises. Each premises has its own sensor that independently monitors local conditions and reports to the computing system, allowing the overall system to achieve high reliability through distributed detection without requiring complex centralized processing at each location.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #1Segmentation

Solution Approach 2:

The patent combines data from multiple independent sensor reports into a unified emergency detection decision. The computing system aggregates emergency-state reports from multiple customer premises and uses this combined information to determine region-wide emergency situations, improving detection reliability through data fusion while keeping individual device complexity low.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #5Merging (Combining)

2Productivity

If the computing system coordinates remedial actions across multiple customer premises, then the productivity of emergency response is improved, but the loss of time for system setup increases

Engineering Contradiction:

Improveemergency response efficiencyVSAvoidsystem configuration time

Core Design Contradiction:

ProductivityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The system pre-configures communication channels and coordination protocols between customer premises devices and the computing system before emergencies occur. Network connections, data formats, and response protocols are established in advance, allowing the system to immediately coordinate remedial actions across multiple premises when an emergency is detected without time-consuming setup during the actual emergency response.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Data Source

PatentUS12451001B2Use of crowdsourcing as basis to predict emergency impact and to facilitate emergency response

Publication Date: 2025.10.21 ROKU INC

AI summary

A method and a system for using crowdsourcing as a basis to predict and respond to emergency impact. An example method includes (i) a computing system receiving emergency-state reporting provided by multiple customer premises in a region, (ii) the computing system determining, based on the received emergency-state reporting provided by the multiple customer premises in the region, that a region-wide emergency situation exists in the region, and (iii) the computing system taking action, in response to the determining, based on the emergency-state reporting provided by the multiple customer premises in the region, that the region-wide emergency situation exists in the region.