Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Proetex is a European Integrated Project dedicated to micro- and nano-technology-based wearable equipment for emergency operators. During the first year of work, a careful analysis of several emergency scenarios has been carried out and has resulted in the design of a complete “smart” uniform for fire-fighters and emergency rescuers. These garments aim at monitoring both physiological parameters, position and posture of the operators and the presence of external potential sources of danger and to send these data to a remote coordinating unit. In the following, the main issues of the design flow will be described and discussed.

The coordinated reaction to a large-scale disaster is a challenging research problem. The Robocup rescue simulation league addresses this research problem but is currently lacking an interface to real-world real-time data to test the validity of both simulation and simulated reactions. In this paper, we describe a wearable-computing-based real world interface to the Robocup Rescue simulation software and provide some updated results of preliminary evaluations.

This paper presents an approach of using game-like techniques to engage firemen from the Paris Fire Brigade into a participatory design process of wearable computing for emergency response. The approach is motivated by explaining the specific difficulties of the domain and technology and by explaining how to address them in a user-centered design approach featuring multiple prototyping steps. A multiplayer virtual reality computer game is one of these techniques. The paper shows how the design of the computer game is informed and validated by other techniques and how it can be used successfully to simulate certain characteristics of the domain and the technologies that are relevant for design. As such we present it as a tool to mediate and facilitate the collaboration of technology providers and users, empowering end-users to leverage their domain expertise to explore, assess and design well-fitting solutions in a creative, reflective and enjoyable collaborative process.

During disaster response, networks can become overloaded and are susceptible to complete failure in the disaster area. This disables mobile communication, hindering response efforts from mobile users. Mobile users make use of various heterogeneous devices and require infrastructure to facilitate the communication of distributed information. Communication flow among mobile users is disorganized as it is either too strong and hierarchical or too flexible and dynamic. We have designed ubiquitous mobile infrastructures to match the response environment’s communication flows and telecommunications, and produced a ubiquitous mobile communication system (ubimobcom). The design standardizes the information exchanges between mobile users. In this paper, we show that ubimobcom makes cooperation and coordination among mobile users possible at the disaster. Using ubimobcom, mobile users can be coordinated and can cooperate in outdoor areas, besides; they can continue connected with their disaster operation center. We describe the ubimobcom system to illustrate the use of communication by mobile users to disasters that may range from minor to catastrophic.

Due to the extreme environmental conditions, speech recognition in the rescue operation domain is a complex and difficult task. Various types of noise and speaker stress represent the main problems for the recognition engine. Within the SHARE project, a dedicated domain specific training corpus was recorded to improve the robustness of the audio indexing service. An experimental evaluation showed that a speech recognition model trained with a small amount of domain specific data outperforms models based on a large set of already available data from other domains. Using the domain specific models, the number of false alarms produced in a noisy testing environment could be reduced by 80%.

At emergency services around the world, the use of IT is oftentimes still limited to the stationary HQ dispatch system. This paper suggests how to overcome this limitation by introducing a Mobile Information and Communi cation System for Emergency Services, MIKoBOS, that digitally links the emergency site with the central dispatch system. For use in the situation room and beyond, digLT is presented, a digital situation table with Fovea-Tabletts, allowing a team of experts to more easily develop a common picture of major emergency situations they are to manage. An actual emergency response sce nario is used to discuss how these technologies may be applied and integrated.

The analysis of emergency response actions usually concentrates on failures as a means to improve future procedures and emergency plans. In this paper we adopt a resilience approach that focuses on the analysis of successful actions. We use group storytelling to recall the actions performed by emergency teams during an incident. A method aimed at recognizing resilient actions is proposed and its application is illustrated in a real case.