Interactive Accessible Notifications for Emergency Notification Systems

5th International Conference, UAHCI 2009, Held as Part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a hurricane approaching); so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for Emergency Management Systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deaf blind people). The knowledge codified in the proposed ontology could be used to enhance and promote the use of non-conventional interfaces for notifying emergency messages thus providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.This work is funded by the project UIA4SIGE (TSI2007-03394) supported by the [Spanish] Ministry of Education and by an agreement with the DGPCE of the [Spanish] Ministry of Interior.Publicad

Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments

The preparedness phase is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards. During this phase, emergency plans are developed to establish, among other procedures, evacuation and emergency escape routes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support and improve these procedures providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to all people in the affected zone. Current emergency management and evacuation systems do not adapt information to the context and the profile of each person, so messages received in the emergency might be useless. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria that ICT-based systems could achieve in order to avoid this problem adapting emergency alerts and evacuation routes to different situations and people. Moreover, in order to prove the applicability of such criteria, we define a mechanism that can be used as a complement of traditional evacuation systems to provide personalized alerts and evacuation routes to all kinds of people during emergency situations in working places. This mechanism is composed by three main components: CAP-ONES for notifying emergency alerts, NERES for defining emergency plans and generating personalized evacuation routes, and iNeres as the interface to receive and visualize these routes on smartphones. The usability and understandability of proposed interface has been assessed through a user study performed in a fire simulation in an indoor environment. This evaluation demonstrated that users considered iNeres easy to understand, to learn and to use, and they also found very innovative the idea to use smartphones as a support for escaping instead of static signals on walls and doors

Interactive accessible notifications for emergency notification systems

Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a hurricane approaching); so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for Emergency Management Systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deaf blind people). The knowledge codified in the proposed ontology could be used to enhance and promote the use of non-conventional interfaces for notifying emergency messages thus providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg