Design guidelines for human computer interfaces supporting fire emergency response

Design Guidelines for HC Interfaces
Supporting Fire Emergency Response

Associate Professor Lili Yang

(BSc MSC PhD CITP FBCS)
Management of Information, Decision & Operation
School of Business & Economics
Loughborough University
United Kingdom

Introduction
 Fire is a major cause of human suffering and material
loss in the UK.
 Every year about 40,000 accidental house & building
fires in England that resulted in around 285 deaths and
9,000 people injured.
 It is imperative to improve the capability in dealing with
fire emergencies and minimise the severity of their
impact.

Introduction

 The majority of the efforts were focused on (Turoff et al.,
2004)
 Building infrastructure improvements
 Underlying technologies development
 Technology driven systems
 There was a little research related to response work during
emergencies, in particular to understand and recognise the
situation awareness of first responders.
 On site information retrieving, sharing and presenting in the
right format, at the right time, and to the right people can
significantly improve the decision making of first responders
(Carver & Turoff, 2007; Manoj & Baker, 2007).

Introduction
 Secure Adhoc Fire and Emergency Safety Network
(SAFETYNET) funded by the Department of Trade and
Industry, UK (Project No. TP/3/PIT/6/I/16993)

 Total budget: £1.3 million

 7 industrial partners involved

 Website: www.fireSafetynet.org.uk

Project Objectives

The objectives of this project is to:

 Collect user requirements for developing ER systems
for Large scale building fires.
 Understand the situation or context of first responders
during emergencies.
 Establish sensor networks for information retrieving
and data transmission.
 Find the effective way to present information to first
responders.
 Provide a collaborative platform for the stakeholders
during emergencies.

Project Objectives

In relation to achieving project objectives this paper
presents:

 Important Contextual Factors to be considered
during design and development of IS supporting for
Fire Emergency Response

 Robust and exclusive set of design decisions
suitable to meet the physical, perceptual and
cognitive attributes expected in the human
computer interfaces supporting firefighters.

Methodology

 The proposed method Goal Directed
Information Analysis (GDIA) is used to identify
information requirements for better situation
Awareness (SA) from different fire fighter job
roles.

Field Work

 Three fire & Rescue Services (Derbyshire,
Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire) in the UK were
selected as the case study.

 The following Jobs were identified as the most
important for fire emergency in a large scale structure.
 Incident commander (IC)
 Sector commander (SC)
 Breathing Apparatus entrance control officer
(BAECO)
 Breathing Apparatus (BA) wearers.

Field Work

 Participants from each of the four job roles were
selected for the requirements gathering

 4*11 = 44 semi-structured interviews were carried
out with the firefighters

 It was also supported by the data captured from
many field observations of fire simulation and
training exercises, fire and rescue related
documentation.

Influential Contextual Factors

 The contextual considerations are essential as it
influence the formulation of Information systems
interface design guidelines from the following aspects:
 mode of access to the information
 type and size of the interface
 content and amount of information to be displayed for
different job roles and different contextual conditions

 These contextual factors were identified from our field
work.

26th Nov 2011

Influential Contextual Factors
1. Excessive Noise: the hearing capability is impaired.
2. Poor Visibility: smoke filled conditions
3. Hazardous Working Environment.
4. Less physical freedom for BA wearers: personal protective
equipment etc.
5. Differences in the Level of Mobility.
6. Rapid Pace of Fire Fighting Operations
7. Limited Communication Technology Used by Fire Fighters
during Operations
..........

Design Decisions & Their Application

1. Select a proper device and mode for information
presentation and user interaction

 audio and visual aid interface design
 a special designed Head Mounted Monitor, and a set of
speakers embedded in the fire fighter’s helmet.
 reduce the influence of poor visibility and less use of
their hands.
 Throat Voice commands control the monitor.


2. Facilitate efficient direct manipulation of IT
devices

use touched screen rather than keyboard for their direction
manipulation.
Pre-defined forms are proposed with Drop-down Option lists
and Option Check Boxes.
In a rare situation where the fire commanders have to
manually entre some information, they can use their own
handwriting with the support of a “stylus”.
introduce a “Drawing Tool Box”, consisting of several user
friendly drawing tools, to facilitate data entry needs.

3. Support rapid changes of priority, cognitive
demand and situations

 Prominently display key information that triggers critical
situations.
 Provide rapid navigation across interfaces capable of
displaying different levels of situational awareness, for
example
 perception level,
 comprehensive level
 projection level.


4. Provide autonomy for first responders to select
information according to their individual
preferences
 First responders working on different job roles are likely
to need different information at different stages.
 Their individual level of experience and skill are
different, they may need different types of information to
be called onto the same interface to form their
individual situational awareness.
 Introduce a flexible information Filtering option, e.g.
knowledge-based Filtering that can be controlled by the
end-users.

 Level 1 SA - Perception information related to both the internal
and external context of the incident.
 Level 2 SA - Comprehension information
 Level 3 SA - Projection information
 Alerts – Presenting audio and visual warnings to users.
 Data input and querying – Providing data entry, querying, and
other user interaction portal.
 Setting up and customization – Interfaces for making initial
configuration and personal preference.
 Report generation – Generating a report for the post-incident
analysis of the activities and the premises involved in the
incident.

Example 1: Front-line fire fighter’s indoor navigation
interface

Example 2: Monitoring front-line fire fighters in
reconnaissance missions

Example 3: Interface of supporting rapid change of
cognitive demands

Comprehensive level

Perception level Projection level


 Example 4: Interface of supporting on-site direct
manipulation of IT devices and collaboration

Design guidelines for human computer interfaces supporting fire emergency response

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