The SAFER project, led by Professor Anastasos Sextos, aims to develop a comprehensive scheme to enhance the seismic safety and resilience of school buildings in Nepal.

Part of the project involves the development of a diagnostics algorithm for reliable pre- and post-earthquake structural inspection. This will lead to the risk-based prioritization of schools that need strengthening.

Professor Sextos approached Research IT to incorporate the diagnostic algorithm into an easy-to-use smartphone app that can be used by field engineers to capture information about a school building while they are carrying out assessment on-site. Dr. Charlotte Mason has developed an app for Android devices which is currently being tested in the field in Nepal.

The information collected by the app includes GPS coordinates, photographs and technical data about the building. The application then runs the diagnostic algorithm to give each building a preliminary safety score.

Although any person can download the Android application from the Google Play Store and enter data and photographs into it, only users who have a user account and password are able to upload this information to a central server.

Since network availability may be limited or slow in more rural areas, the user has full control of when to upload the data and can opt to send just school assessment data, or school assessment data with photographs.

The app is supported by a web application which provides an overview of the data from multiple school assessments. Multiple assessment data can be displayed in tables, as charts, or as a heat map.

The Android app and web application are supported by:

• A MySQL database, which stores the data from the school building assessments, plus configuration data for the applications.
• An API which runs on a web server, used by the two applications to interact with the database.
• A long-term storage facility to store photograph files.