Do First Responders Find Active911 Useful?

Mobile technology continues to advance, as does the field of emergency management. Today, emergency management personnel utilize the latest technology in all phases of emergency management, which include mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This proposed study particularly identifies mobile technology in the response phase of emergency management pertaining to first responders. Specific technologies on the rise in the field of emergency management include mobile applications. Applications such as Active911 were developed in detail for first responders. It was found that not all first responders take advantage of existing technology and the reasons vary. This mixed methods study was created to be a follow-up study based on previous work completed involving Active911’s implementation in the Russellville Fire Department, Arkansas. The survey questions were designed to answer the central research question: Do first responders find Active911 useful? Participants’ responses were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine the trends in each of their responses

City Mesh - Resilient first responder communication

Communication between first responders is vital to the success of large scale disaster management. But communication technologies used by first responders today do not scale well due to heterogeneity, point-to-point connections, and centralized communication structures. As the popularity of devices equipped with Wi-Fi grows, the number of access points (APs) in city centers increases as well. This communication infrastructure exists and should be used in city wide disasters as it is readily available in areas with high population density. In this paper, we investigate Wi-Fi access points in 5 major cities deployed in stores, bars, and restaurants. We want to answer the question if these APs can be used as a mesh networking backbone in disaster response. The main contributions of this paper are (i) the surveyed and analyzed public Wi-Fi layout of five major cities and (ii) the connectivity analysis of the city wide network topology