My Relief: A Socio-Technical Mobile Flood Support System in Malaysia

Abstract

Recurring monsoon floods in Malaysia disrupt communication, shelter access, resource coordination, and recovery of belongings. This study designs and evaluates My Relief, an Android flood-support application integrating group chat, global positioning system-assisted relief-centre navigation, donation search and acceptance, and a lost-and-found registry within a socio-technical design. Development followed an Agile lifecycle covering planning, design, development, testing, and deployment. An online questionnaire was completed by 30 respondents from flood-prone Malaysian communities, including participants with and without direct flood experience. Descriptive statistics and thematic grouping of open-ended feedback were used. Overall, 76.7% considered a dedicated flood-relief application helpful, 20.0% were unsure, and 3.3% were doubtful. All respondents rated group chat extremely helpful; global positioning system directions were rated extremely helpful by the majority, while donation and lost-and-found functions were generally rated very or extremely helpful. The findings provide exploratory evidence for an integrated mobile support design. Larger usability, security, and field-resilience evaluations are required because the sample was small and purposive and no inferential validation was performed.