As in disasters the availability of information and communication technology services can be
severely disrupted the author explores challenges and opportunities to work around such
disruptions. He therefore empirically analyzes how people in disasters use remnants of
technology to still communicate their needs. Based on this he suggests quality attributes
whose implementation can support the resilience in technology. To exemplify this he develops
iteratively two mobile ad-hoc systems and explores their feasibility and implications for
emergency response under close-to-real conditions. Compared to the state of the art both
systems are independent from preexisting network infrastructure and run on off-the-shelf
smartphones.
