A Location-based Service for Voluntary Early Mental Health Interventions in the Event of Natural Disasters based on Minimalistic Tele-operated Android Robots Technology: A Conceptual Research Framework for Future

Providing early mental health services during a natural disaster is a great challenge for disaster management team. Meanwhile, lack of access to adequate mental-health professionals in the early stages of large-scale catastrophe can dramatically influence the trend of a successful disaster mental health response.However, exploitation of the capabilities of mental health volunteer professionals can play a great role in process of effective recovery of individual disaster survivors.Effective coordination of volunteer mental health professionals in the complex circumstance of large-scale catastrophes is often crucial, particularly when the possibility of attendance and supplying enough number of the volunteers in the disaster area is limited because of the magnitude of the disaster in the early stages of the phenomenon.In this research, a novel conceptual model and framework is proposed based on the new technologies in the fields of Geo-informatics and Robotics. The aim is to provide a robust and sustainable framework to guarantee the efficient distance participation of the mental health volunteer professionals in the early stages of natural catastrophes.To this end, the concepts of Web GIS and Location-based Services (LBS) are adopted to develop a geo-spatial service based on the advances in the world of humanoid robotics.So far, the whole attentions have been paid to develop the location-based services for the smart phones, pocket PCs and tablet devices in the geospatial industry. Meanwhile, a new generation of communication media, namely tele-operated androids, has been evolvingduring past few years and nonetheless this intuitive technology has received no attention regarding this matter.Tele-operated android robots are the state of art in the field humanoid robotics. Their appearance is very human-like, modeled from a real individual, as so are their motions. A real human can operate them during a remote conversation in order to transfer his presence to the other side of interaction.The new generation of tele-operated android robots is designed to appear and behave like a minimalistic human and therefore allows people from different gender, age and appearance use them to transfer and express their presence during a long distance interaction.The cellphone-type tele-operated android robots, as a family of this technology and developed based on the same concept, provides a natural and realistic communication between two remote users as if they are facing each other and interacting. Therefore it is promising that in the near future this prototype of cellphones substitute the current generation of Smart Phones and Tablets.In this paper, combining the above-mentioned concepts, a novel framework has been suggested for the future possibilities of communication during the early stages of natural disasters. Authors believe that the adoption of participatory location-based services for the cellphone-type tele-operated android robots can contribute to a more effective and realistic remote communication between volunteer mental health professionals and individual disaster survivors which eventually facilitates the emotional and mental recovery process.

کلیدواژه ها:

Disaster Management ، Mental Health ، Location-based Service ، Web GIS ، Teleoperated Android Robots