• Hardware
• Software
• Applications
• • Healthcare
  • Emergency response
  • • Objectives of the user tests
    • Participants in the tests
    • Task scenario
    • Experiment setup
    • Testing methodology and procedure
    • Data collection and analysis
    • Results
  • Maintenance
  • Production

Wizard of Oz study of indoor positioning technologies at Paris training house, March 2007

In each mission, one or several teams of fire-fighters entered the building, with the task of finding bottles of water placed inside of it in different rooms. We defined every mission simply by setting up the initial conditions of the situation and then letting the fire-fighters act according to their common practices. The position information, provided by the facilitators was introduced in different forms for each mission.
In the first mission we provided the fire-fighters no location information at all. We tracked the position of the members of the fire-fighters team using the prototyping platform, but this information was not provided to the fire-fighters. We used this first mission as a reference to compare with in the other two missions. Following their common set of practices, the team toured the complete building systematically, going from one room to the next using their complete body to grasp their environment until they found the three hidden bottles. At the end of the reconnaissance mission, the fire fighters reported to the commander, drawing a sketch of the building based on their recalls of the path that they followed, besides any other details that could be relevant to the intervention.

Evaluation of Command Post Application, December 2006/ March 2007

When the Command Post Application runs on a Smartboard the applications supports single finger and double finger touch interaction. A usability test on these touching interaction concepts was conducted in December of 2006.

Sensor Network LifeNet

To obtain the reference measurements of the sensor network two distinct measurements were carried out. The first measurement was carried out without any people in the area of the LifeNet. This was to obtain the relative measurements between all the sensor nodes. The second measurement was done during training exercises with different teams of firemen as explained before. These measurements were done to obtain the impact of moving nodes (the fireman) within the sensor network.

Virtual Reality Simulation FireSim

As with the training exercises, the virtual simulations were also based on a scenario for a search and rescue mission, asking the player to find a victim that was supposed to be located in the building. As general usability, realism and user acceptance of the application where the objectives of the study, the sessions were filmed and after the session an open interview was conducted asking about shortcomings of the simulation, suggestions for improvement and general feedback about the LifeNet approach. While not part of the objectives at this stage, the movements of the player and any actions were logged for later analysis.