eResponse

Volunteer sea rescue crews at NSRI Bakoven coordinate emergencies through phone calls and WhatsApp groups. As a result, incident information is scattered and the response has no central record. Duty officers, the station’s Coxswains and Station Commanders, cannot easily tell which volunteers are responding, and once crews leave the station there is no way to see where they are. Nothing records when a report came in, when dispatch was approved, or when the incident closed. Callout alerts can be missed by a volunteer whose phone is silent, and rank and callout authority cannot be enforced. Critical contacts and defibrillator locations sit outside the coordination process entirely.

eResponse is a coordination platform developed by Team 09 (Code Red) under INF4027W for NSRI Station 2, and it addresses each of these problems through two connected parts.

Mobile application (public and responders)

• Members of the public report emergencies with their location attached and receive confirmation that help is on the way.
• Responders receive dispatch alerts that take over the full screen with alarm audio, override silent mode and stay active until answered, so a sleeping volunteer does not miss a callout.
• Responders accept or decline dispatches, navigate to the scene and share their live location while on an incident.
• Incident chat and push-to-talk voice keep communication tied to each callout.
• Crew can call critical station numbers with a single tap, and the nearest defibrillators appear automatically on drowning incidents.

Web dashboard (duty officers)

• Duty officers see every active incident and every crew member on a single screen, and track responders’ live positions on a map.
• Alerts go only to eligible on-duty responders, and their accepts and declines are tracked live.
• Every dispatch, decision and message, from report to closure, is timestamped, giving the station an auditable incident record.
• New crew registrations are vetted before they can receive dispatches, and incidents close only with Station Commander approval.
• Station Commanders can see neighbouring stations’ capability when scaling a response.

The system was shaped by the station’s own operational needs and validated with the station at each stage. Access follows the station’s five operational ranks and is enforced on the server. Juniors have training access only, Crew and Senior Crew can respond to callouts, Coxswains can initiate them, and Station Commanders hold full rights. This stops untrained volunteers from self-deploying and records who authorised each response. Incident records are kept separately from live location data, so the station gains both a dependable audit trail and real-time awareness. Although built for Station 2, the system’s data model extends to the wider NSRI network.