Post-Disaster Management

Vo, Justin

Student Work

Post-Disaster Management

Public Deposited

The goal of this project was to design a system to match volunteer mental health care providers with individuals seeking care after experiencing a natural disaster. This was done through developing an optimization model for matching based on volunteer and client preferences and availability and an application prototype for users to input the information used for matching. After developing our matching model, we evaluated its performance by running it with different sets of synthetic data. We found that the model performs best when the ratio of clients to volunteers is less than 10:1. When the model was tested with various ratios below this threshold, we found that more than 70% of clients were matched to volunteers after two rounds of matching. Our application prototype was evaluated at three different stages by mental health experts and potential client users. We received feedback that we implemented during our final revisions to improve the clarity of information throughout the application. Overall, it was found that our application prototype was effective in communicating objectives to the sample of potential users we evaluated. With the prevalence of natural disasters increasing around the world, these tools could be used to support individuals who experience disasters and mitigate the chance of them developing PTSD.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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