Astute symposium 10/10/2013 - Mobile emergency dispatching

1. EMERGENCY DEMONSTRATOR
bart.adams@luciad.com

2. EMERGENCY DEMONSTRATOR LEADER
Partners involved in demonstrator
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3. EMERGENCY DISPATCHING
CURRENT PRACTICE
Centralized system
• Amount of information can be overwhelming
• Difficult to make right decisions
Text and audio communication
• Not integrated
• Difficult when many actors involved
• Limited situational awareness
Supported by paper documents
• Information often outdated
• No real-time updates
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4. EMERGENCY DISPATCHING
THE FUTURE WITH ASTUTE
Pro-active decision support
•
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Aid commanders, superiors,... by
providing suggestions for actions
Show relevant data only
Multi-modal communication
•
Integrated audio, video, voice, haptic,
messaging, map annotations,…
Adaptive map-centric HMI
•
•
Embedded on-sleeve, in-vehicle, etc.
Updated in real-time with tracking feeds,
annotations,...
All based on user state and context

5. ASTUTE BENEFITS
Pro-activeness:
Pro-actively compute best approach given weather forecast and presence
of dangerous goods
Decision support:
Aid commander by assigning most appropriate team members to task
Multi-modal HMI:
Choose between visual, haptic, audio alerts based on severity
Adaptive HMI:
Switch to audio-only firefighter HMI when visibility lost due to smoke
Seamless connectivity:
All actors maintain situational picture through embedded, mobile, and
remote HMIs
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6. USER CENTRIC APPROACH
Field Studies
Realistic Scenario, Storyboarding
Timeline, Personas, Relationships
Mental Model
Task Analysis, Information Needs
Requirements
Architecture, HMI Designs
Prototype Implementation
Usability Tests

7. Storyboard
Footer
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8. Timeline
Footer
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9. Information Needs
Footer
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10. HMI Designs
Footer
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11. PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION
Commander
Tablet-size HMI
Firefighters
On-sleeve HMI
Server
inside firetruck
Crisis team
Web-based HMI
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12. USABILITY TESTS
3 days testing by Belgian firefighters and commanders
• 8 firefighters (Merksplas, Hasselt, Ninove)
• 7 commanders (Dendermonde, Genk, Merksplas, Hasselt, Ninove)
Example tests
• Commander: find location of dangerous goods
• Firefighter: perform search-and-rescue operation
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13. TEST RESULTS
Positive Feedback
• Plans and realtime information are great
• I like tablet applications for crisis management
• Looks to be very applicable and to be integrated with other
research projects
• I would certainly buy this
• This would be a great help in exploring unknown buildings
• ...
Concerns
• Can make firefighter negligent
• More information should be provided pro-actively
• ...

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15. 15

16. TECHNICAL CHALLENGES TACKLED
• High performance visualization and interaction
 Resource-constrained mobile devices
• Reasoning on fast changing context using ontologies
 Many events (e.g., position updates)
 Separate asynchronous engines (e.g., routing)
• Data preparation and packaging
 Efficient file format
 OGC GeoPackage
• Offline/online operation
• Seamless connectivity
 Messaging protocol
 OGC GeoPackage
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17. OGC GEOPACKAGE
• Upcoming standardized format for geospatial data
 Vector data (streets, buildings) and raster data (aerial imagery)
 Based on sqlite
• Improved interoperability, ideal for mobile
• Active involvement in SWG by Luciad from within Astute
 Open source draft implementation available
 https://bitbucket.org/luciad/libgpkg
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18. CONCLUDING NOTES
Current work practice in emergency domain is suboptimal
• Logical next step is to provide digital documents on tablet
Astute emergency demonstrator looks beyond next step
• Field operations through multi-modal and adaptive HMIs
• Proactive support taking user state and context into account
Applicable to other domains involving field operations
Relation to other projects
• Smart@Fire: Next generation firefighter suit
• FireBee: Indoor localization for emergency situations
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19. THANK YOU!
QUESTIONS?