New smartphone app, SATIDA Collect (Satellite Technologies for Improved Drought Risk Assessment), was developed to support Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières – MSF) and provides a easy and standardized way of collecting information to forecast famine.

Researchers and scientists from the Vienna University of Technology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, and the Austrian Central Institution for Meteorology and Geodynamics created the current version of SATIDA Collect, which provides a simple, quick and standardized way of collecting information about malnutrition, access to resources, food prices, coping capacities and other socio-economic factors. Every assessment includes GPS coordinates and is automatically uploaded to a database. This database allows the export of assessments for further data analysis and data sharing – mapping areas of risk of food shortages, drought, malnutrition and civil unrest.

The app, which is designed to obtain information from vulnerable regions has the potential of helping aid agencies to plan accordingly during times of crisis and intervene, and has already been tested in Central African Republic.

SATIDA Collect is currently available for Android 2.3+: SATIDA Collect for Android