Usage of Social Media and Smartphone Application in Assessment of Physical and Psychological Well-Being of Individuals in Times of a Major Air Pollution Crisis

Zhang, Melvyn WB; Ho, Cyrus SH; Fang, Pan; Lu, Yanxia; Ho, Roger CM

In addition, a Web-based, smartphone-based application was also deployed. The Web-based smartphone application was designed to incorporate the following features: (1) general haze information, (2) events rescheduling system, (3) hospital emergency helplines and 24-hour clinic helplines and locations, and (4) a screening questionnaire, as previously mentioned. The smartphone application was developed to facilitate user’s accessibility of our questionnaire on their smartphone devices. The Web-based smartphone application was developed within hours of the commencement of the current air-quality crisis by means of a Web-based toolkit. The Web-based smartphone toolkit enabled the integration of the above-mentioned feature via basic hypertext markup language programming. The authors have developed a previous events rescheduling system that tapped in to a text messaging gateway to disseminate information, and this system was integrated within the application itself, as shown in Figures 1-7.