Waterford Institute of Technology has landed a €15.8m grant to research the use of social networks to link all technologies in and outside the home, writes LISA O'CARROLL

IT'S THE cyber-equivalent of rubber-necking. You pass a traffic accident, take a snap on your phone, then Tweet it to your followers or Facebook your friends. A tad tasteless, but that's our new bare-all-broadcast-all society.

But imagine this being used on a professional level.

You're a doctor and you're just getting off the plane to deal with a humanitarian crisis.

You switch on your phone and plug straight into professional emergency service photographs, maps and a real-time analysis of the rescue operation. It's not rubber-necking, it's a dynamic professional emergency community.

The technology exists to do this now. But Twitter and Facebook aren't exactly professional tools for the likes of Concern, Trócaire or Médecins sans Frontières.

For a start they are open communities with next-to-no privacy and are very limited in terms of document-sharing and in terms of professional database requirements for live information on unfolding disasters.

But from October the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) is hoping to change all of that after landing a €15.8 million EU grant for R&D in this area.

It is hoping to develop a framework technology that will use the concept of social networking to link all our technologies inside and outside the home through computers, phones, smart cards and a myriad of yet-to-be-created equipment. It's an always-connected all-the-time society.

"This is the only Irish-led project of this scale. It's a significant win for Ireland in terms of research, academic quality and industrial development," said Kevin Doolin, who heads up WIT's telecommunications software and systems group.

Doolin spent three months working full-time on the proposal and another three months going through the EU wringer, so it was a hard-won prize.

He will head a Europe-wide team involving 16 academic partners, such as universities, and six industry partners like Intel Ireland, IBM and NEC. And he will target three areas for live research - student, enterprise and emergency communities.

Technology to help emergency services harness the social aspect of the web is developing fast.

A young Irish entrepreneur is making waves internationally with a new software package called Decisions For Heroes.

Cliff rescue climber Robin Blandford already knew the amount of paperwork involved in emergency operations and came up with a nifty solution to make the logistics of emergency calls effortless.

Armed with a laptop and internet connection, 999 responders can punch in details of their rescue operations and training exercises. The software automatically performs analytical charting, draws heat maps, and benchmarks reports to outline areas of strength, weakness and expertise.

Ushahidi, another application, is becoming one of the most talked-about web tools in the developing worlds. It uses the crowd - texters, e-mailers, tweeters - to help it locate victims of disasters.

The brain-child of Kenyan-born Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi was borne out of her frustration during the Kenyan general election three years ago, which was marred by violence and allegations of vote-rigging.

Blogging as the crisis was developing, she became a focal point for dissident voices and people started posting reports of incidents of violence on the bottom of her blog. She decided there had to be a better way of recording the information and came up with a Google Maps mash-up that instantly gave a visual picture of the flashpoints throughout the country.

Two years later Ushahidi was in overdrive, when it was adapted for the Haiti earthquake. Within four days it had received more than 100,000 reports from the ground - all aggregated on a map into categories, including fire, persons trapped and medical emergency.

Since then it continues to map information ranging from requests for blood to outbreaks of violence.

An open application, it has also been used in Washington to map snowdrifts, in Kenya to track wildlife movements, and in Atlanta to map crime.

Back to Waterford, and Doolin will be taking these kind of applications to another level with the help of sensors and web software such as Java and Jini that seamlessly connect devices, be they printers, mobile phones or laptops.

His research is predicated on the notion that we will all one day inhabit a "personal smart space".

As he points out, nowadays our relationship with smart technology begins the day we are born. Baby tags in hospitals come embedded with alarms to foil baby-snatchers.

Elsewhere, developments in smart technology will make our relationship with electronic devices even easier.

Only this week a US company announced it was developing light-weight batteries that could be stitched into fabric, which would enable clothes to power mobile phones.

In the US Walmart is testing RFID sensors - radio frequency identifiers. These use nano-technology and can be as thin as paper and as small as a cardigan button. They will be placed in items of clothing enabling the store to monitor sales and restock store shelves.

Ultimately RFIDs could, privacy laws permitting, be used to interact with customers, helping the homeowner do their own stock-taking.

If cartons of milk carried RFIDs, for example, and retailers were synched in with a futuristic phone app on your phone that also synched with your fridge, you could get an alert warning that you were running low on milk the next time you passed a shop.

There are also huge developments in nano-technology that will unleash even more potential applications.

"Nano-technology can create sensors as small as dust particles. You could scatter them on the floor of a shop, somebody could walk through it and you could monitor where they walk," says Doolin. "Pervasive technology is all about making technology completely disappear for the user. They will use it but they won't even be aware of it."

That is his €15.8 million gift to us.