• Human Centric
• UCD in action
• • Emergency Response - BSPP
  • Healthcare - GESPAG
  • Production - SKODA
  • Maintenance - EADS
• The importance of social and human aspects
• UCD Methodology and Dimensions
• The factors

The job of fire fighting is dangerous per definition. There is always a certain risk involved but none the less, fire fighters obviously try to calculate and manage these risks and keep them as low as possible. Fire fighters may frequently get close to the limits of their physiological capacity during interventions. The resulting exhaustion is dangerous as it may reduce the fire fighter’s ability to make the right decisions and carry out the required actions in time to conclude the mission safely. Fighting fires is also an expensive activity, including highly trained staff and equipment. That is why fire fighters have to conduct their operations as efficiently as possible. Since one of the major advances of wearable computing is that people can continue with their primary activity while being provided with information, it is therefore not surprising that wearables can greatly improve fighting fire.

WearIT can contribute to fire fighting by enhancement of:

• Information Acquisition: By wearing pace and acceleration sensors, a fireman could automatically create a schematic map while entering a building. Then, when discovering an important object he can explicitly enter a description for this object.
• Monitoring: Wearable computing can enhance monitoring in two ways: firstly, make more parameters available through on- body and off- body sensors. Secondly, it can make these parameters better observable through context-aware combination and presentation of the parameters on wearable output devices.
• Self-organization: Wearable computing enables team members to maintain communication during an intervention and enhance their perception of the shared situation. Therefore the team has sufficient knowledge to take more decisions locally.
• Spatial Audio: Spatial audio refers to audio output for which the position of sound sources can be localized. For example, if a navigational system prompts its user to turn right, the respective spatial audio output would be audible on the right side of the user. This is an important feature for cognitively adequate and context-sensitive information presentation.
• Bio-sensors: Through on-body sensors wearable computing can capture physiological data about people. Wearable sensors have been proposed to monitor the health condition of fire fighters and, in case of a critical condition, use other wearable technologies to signal an alert and communicate it to fellow fire fighters. For emergency personal this is particularly useful to determine the stress-level of a given activity. Additionally, emergency personal can use biometrical technology for health care: they can place on-body sensors on injured people to monitor and manage their status.
• Context-awareness: This will be one of the central characteristics of effective wearable computing support.  Context-awareness is enabled by information about the users gained from sensors and other information sources that specifically fits his or her current situation.
• Personalization: Complementary to context-awareness, personalization is enabled by information about the user. It consists in providing services and information to the user that specifically fit his or her needs, such as available cognitive resources, preferences for output modalities etc.