ETF Students Develop "Emergency Accommodation" Application

In the floods that hit Bosnia and Herzegovina, at least 10,000 families were left homeless. According to preliminary census results, there are over 450,000 vacant apartments in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Considering this data, Ajdin Kahrović, a student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Sarajevo, along with his colleague Faris Čakarić, developed a web application intended to encourage citizens to share their surplus living space with others, reports the Patria News Agency.

Furthermore, the web application aims to become a centralized place for collecting information about all available living spaces for people displaced by the floods.

• We believe that it is possible to find 10,000 apartments from that number that are habitable or can be made so with minimal investment. All that is needed is the solidarity of owners to temporarily provide their surplus living space (apartment, floor of a house, weekend house, etc.) to displaced persons – says Kahrović.

The web application is available at: http://hitnismjestaj.etf.ba/ and is supported by assistants from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. The application allows for easy registration of available accommodation, with basic information about the living unit and owner's contact details, and then enables easy searching of accommodation via a Google map integrated into the web application.

- Meanwhile, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the most competent IT institution in Bosnia and Herzegovina, professors, assistants, and students are working on developing crisis software, a platform designed to coordinate the work, resource allocation, logistics utilization, volunteer engagement, etc., of all humanitarian organizations and institutions in crisis situations. The software is based on Sahana EDEN software and can be viewed here: http://eden.etf.unsa.ba/. The 'HitniSmještaj' web application will be integrated with this software, incorporating data from it – states Kahrović.