FAQ (WIP) - Lithium | The People's Sense

Most of your questions may already have an answer.

What is Lithium?

Lithium is a community alerting service, based on a series of compatible, battery-powered IoT sensors that detect dangerous situations, such as house break-ins, smoke, water leakages, and panic, and send emergency push notifications to all the Lithium users nearby, in real-time, using the Helium network.

Lithium does not sell sensors. You need to buy a compatible sensor from an approved partner shop.

How to get started?

The Lithium mobile application can be freely downloaded on both iOS and Android devices. After the initial registration (only email and password are required), you will get real-time alerts from nearby sensors, upon detecting any emergency.

If you want to secure your place and your loved ones and send emergency alerts to nearby users, you need to add any of the compatible LoRaWAN sensors. The full list of supported sensors may be found here.

What can I do in the app?

Lithium provides an ongoing data transfer service for the IoT sensors and alerts you of nearby emergencies. The app gives you two main features: a number of sensor slots, allowing you to add compatible safety sensors to your account, and a number of place slots, allowing you to get alerts from different areas of the world, even if you are not there physically.

As you create an account in the Lithium application, you will get free alerts from the nearby sensors, based on your currently checked-in location. You can always add more watched places (e.g. your child’s school area, your workplace area, your favorite mall, or your holiday house), or to install sensors in your own place, which will trigger alerts for the nearby community in case of emergency.

How do sensors work?

The supported sensors which can be added to the Lithium Network are mostly battery-operated LoRaWAN sensors. These sensors can operate in a low-power mode for a very long time and send data kilometers away using LoRa radio frequency (e.g. 868MHz in Europe). The signals are caught by a nearby Helium gateway, which routes the data through the Helium blockchain, up to the Lithium servers. Data is processed and mapped in the Lithium application, so any user physically located in the proximity of the ongoing emergency gets a push notification.

What’s with the map?

According to previous research, “there are diverse approaches to design multi-hazard apps worldwide, they all try to communicate hazard and risk information to the public in a timely, feasible, consistent, and comprehensible manner to encourage people to stay informed. […] The public, one of our prior studies confirmed, prefers a single map that displays all active hazards. […] they (maps) enable visual representations of the hazards and risks across an entire region, which, unlike numerical risk representations, lead to greater risk avoidance. Second, maps with icons and pictograms can be understood even by those who do not know the language of the message. Third, maps’ visual representations allow people to quickly gain information as to who should take action and who is not affected.” [1]

According to the above excerpt form reputable research, the Lithium app aligns with the most popular approach for displaying hazard-related information, in a clean and easy to read map, displaying the main data for any individual, the precise position of an active emergency, the category (emphasised through both category specific color and icon), the distance from the current location to the incidence point and the time passed since the appearance of the emergency on the map. Using this minimum amount of data, a user shall be able to decide if the emergency affects him, and if he needs to react in any way. The decision is up to the user for his following actions after being notified.

What’s the alerting area?

In order to provide relevant emergencies nearby, the Hexagonal hierarchical geospatial indexing system – h3 (created and used by Uber Inc.), is used. The algorithm matches the hexagonal cell of your current location (no precise location is stored on Lithium’s servers), and the adiacent hexagonal cells, up to the 3rd ring of RES10 hexagons, in case there is any emergency triggered by a nearby community sensor.

Given the above details, the alerting area for both your current checked in location, and any other Place area, has an approximate radius of 500 m. Overlaid, on top of a 500 m circle, that would mean roughly ~0.78 sqkm around the incidence point (the asserted location of the triggered sensor).

What’s with the Check In button?

In order to respect both your data privacy and your phone’s battery, we moved away from background location tracking, as this may impose privacy concerns, drain your battery very fast, and worked unreliable in most of the devices we tested on.

We have implemented the “Check-In” mechanism, so that you can voluntarily provide your current location to calculate the H3 Hexagonal cell you are in and be able to provide you with relevant emergency alerts from the immediate area. (Check what’s the alerting area on the FAQ page.)

By voluntarily tapping the “Check-In” button, you are subscribing to receive real-time emergency alerts from the triggered sensors in the area around your mobile device location, for a maximum period of 7 days. If you move away from the Checked-In area (~500 m radius), you are considered “Out of initial bounds”, so the alerts may not be relevant to you as you are too far away to be affected or to take action. That’s why, while the button is blue, you can check in again to another area for another 7 days. After ~7 days, you will be automatically checked out from your last checked in location, but you can always check in again in the same spot if you like.

Why 7 days?
We’ve set the expiry period to 7 days, as a security measure and to make sure the location is still relevant to you, so you don’t get irrelevant or unwanted notifications from a distant location, that no longer affects you. If you need to subscribe to an area for a longer period of time, there are Places. Check them out!

We do highly encourage you to check in often, wherever you are, so you can be aware of your surroundings, and be the first to know if something goes wrong nearby! Check in at work, at your favourite coffee shop or restaurant, when you’re at the mall, or when you’re on holiday in a new place.

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