VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2 (July to December 2026)

Design, development, and evaluation of MedEx: A geotagging and speech recognition-based emergency communication system for Candon City, Ilocos Sur, Philippines

Efficient emergency reporting systems are critical for reducing response delays in disaster management operations. This study developed and evaluated MedEx, a mobile emergency-reporting application designed to improve the efficiency of pre-dispatch communication in Candon City, Philippines. The system integrates geotagging, speech-to-text input, multimedia reporting, and SMS-based notifications to facilitate real-time incident reporting. The study employed descriptive-developmental methods. “Data were obtained through documentary review, stakeholder interviews, end-user surveys, and system-performance simulations. The Agile Mobile-D methodology was adopted to support the iterative design and development of the application. Respondents were selected through purposive sampling, focusing on stakeholders directly involved in emergency communication processes, and responses were analyzed quantitatively using mean scores based on a 5-point Likert scale. Results showed that MedEx achieved a mean pre-dispatch time of 39.60 seconds, compared with an estimated 90 seconds under the existing manual procedure (the midpoint of a reported 1–2 minute range), representing a 56.00% reduction and a 2.27-fold improvement in processing speed. Usability evaluation yielded a grand mean of 4.34, indicating that the system is highly acceptable, with the strongest performance in learnability and operability.