Identifying and mitigating barriers to situational awareness in Emergency management information systems
Master thesis
Published version
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3102923Utgivelsesdato
2023Metadata
Vis full innførselSamlinger
Sammendrag
Universal design is the design of products, environments, ICT programs and services that makes it possible to be used by all people to the greatest extent possible, without the need of adaption. Disabilities are something many can think of as permanent, but sometimes there are a specific situation that is hindering us from achieving our goals, this is called situational disabilities. When emergency operators in a control room handles critical situations, stress and anxiety, or data overload and attention tunnelling are examples that can lead to a temporarily cognitive disability. This situational disability is hindering them from situational awareness which is necessary to act fast when responding to people in need. The idea is that by finding barriers that is hindering them from situational awareness, and when or where these barriers occur. Then it is possible to look at how universal design can reduce the barriers operators encounter in emergency management information systems by using suitable design principles. To discover barriers an observation pilot at Sykehuspartner´s observation center, two observations at 110 Øst and Sør-Øst, and six semi-structured interviews are conducted. Four of the responders have experience from the emergency center that handles fire (110) and two from the emergency center for medical emergencies (113). The 7 principles of universal design, Shneiderman´s eight golden rules, WCAG, and Principles of designing for SA are the design principles used to address how the interface should be developed to support situational awareness. There are no observation and interviews conducted at the police (112) this time. The result is based exclusively on qualitative data. The results from the data collection and analysis of these shows that most barriers lay in the technology or the human-computer-interface. By using design principals some concrete solutions are suggested: Improvement or search engine, development of an Overview interface, inform about mandatory text fields, separate incidents, better organization of workspace, and a training program for new operators.