Our Story

What we value is 'accurate and prompt information distribution' and 'communicative design, communicative disaster prevention.'

Our Story
Supported by our desire and experience to deliver information as quickly as possible.

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, we have been providing disaster information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In addition to earthquakes and tsunamis, we have also experienced volcanic eruptions, heavy snowfalls, floods and landslides caused by typhoons and heavy rains, tornadoes, and major power outages.

With each experience, we re-evaluate and review the way we communicate information, and have developed a system for distributing disaster prevention information in order to quickly deliver accurate information to protect lives.

On that day of March 11, we noticed that people in the affected areas were unable to watch TV due to power outages or didn't have a radio on hand, and so were not immediately informed of the tsunami warning, which delayed their evacuation. We also realized that the dissemination and distribution of information through Twitter, cell phones, and smart phones was very powerful. There was a new-found need to provide information that was not limited only to the conventional media of TV and radio.

We began distributing disaster prevention information released by the Japan Meteorological Agency immediately following the Great East Japan Earthquake. Initially, we manually transcribed the information into text and pushed it for release, but we realized that we could not take the time to distribute information that is so important in protecting lives where every second counts, so we began to automate the process.

After that, we worked on developing an image generation engine to provide information that is easy for anyone to read and understand. The first time we provided earthquake information with images was on September 30, 2013. In the development of the engine, we paid attention to the design as well as the speed of the generation time. From the start of the engine's operation to the present, this excellent design has remained unchanged and has impacted many users.

Gehirn Disaster Prevention Information History

  • 2011/3
  • 2012/5　Began distribution of disaster prevention weather information
  • 2013/6　Added support for high-temperature warnings
  • 2013/9　Began distribution of visualised earthquake and tsunami information
  • 2014/3　Added support for J-ALERT
  • 2015/8　Added support for Eruption alerts/warnings
  • 2017/4　Began distribution of visualised weather warnings
  • 2017/6　Began distribution of visualised typhoon information
  • 2019/6　Obtained permission for forecasting services (earthquake motion) from the Director-General of the Japan Meteorological Agency
  • 2019/9　Released our Disaster Prevention App for iOS
  • 2019/12　Released our Disaster Prevention App for Android

Protecting people and property

In recent years, Japan has faced a series of unprecedented disasters and crises. In 2013, heavy snowfall, the Awaji Island earthquake, Typhoon No. 18, and the Izu Oshima landslide caused by Typhoon No. 26. In 2014, the Hiroshima landslide, the eruption of Mt. Ontake and heavy snowfall. In 2015, the eruption of Kuchinoerabu Island and heavy rains in the Kanto and Tohoku regions. In 2016, the Kumamoto earthquake, the Tottori earthquake, the Uchiura Bay earthquake, the Iwate Iwaizumi flood, the Tokyo blackout, and the earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture. In all of these disasters, the information distributed by Gehirn was always available to many people.

What we value is to deliver information to as many people as possible so that we can protect people's lives and property and reduce damage as much as possible through "accurate and prompt delivery of information" and "communicative design, communicative disaster prevention". Currently, the people in charge of the disaster prevention information distribution service at Gehirn are people who were affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and people who were affected by the Kumamoto Earthquake. Both of these disasters were hit by tremors as strong as 7 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale and caused tremendous damage, but we are working on developing services to reduce the damage as much as possible by making the most of the lessons learned.

“How I wish I could have delivered this information on that day...”
For the past 10 years, I have thought about this over and over again.
But we can’t send that information to the past, we have to leave the next generation with a disaster management system that is as good as possible. Just like our predecessors who have improved the systems of disaster management. As an engineer, I believe that failures must be remedied by these systems.

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