Emergency Response Scenario

From our empirical research with the Paris Fire Brigade, including interviews, observations and participation in different trainings, we learned that there are three areas of particular interest for support by information technology:

1. communication 
2. localization and navigation 
3. information management.

Accurate indoor localization in particular has been an objective of ubiquitous computing, but still remains an unsolved research problem.
The next section lists the components we have developed and evaluated to address these areas. Because of the different technical complexity of the components and the general maturity of the involved technologies, their development proceeds at different speeds, allowing for evaluations to be carried out that are more or less close to actual working conditions.
As we are following a strong user centred approach we are using different prototyping techniques such as paper prototypes, prototypes in virtual reality and Wizard of Oz to explore and evaluate the usability of technologies that are not yet fully ready to be studied under realistic conditions. In the following, we only report on the evaluations and results for compo-nents for which conclusive user studies could already be conducted. For some components, analysis of results is also not yet completed.