Applying Telepresence to Incident Management: The Virtual Incident Command Center

Abstract

This paper describes an application of telepresence technology to the incident management domain. The system combines national guidelines for incident management with many aspects of collaborative virtual environments to enable effective communication between first responders in the field and remotely located command personnel. A brief overview of existing incident management systems is given, followed by a set of requirements for future systems. We then describe our virtual incident command center (VICC) prototype, explain how it addresses the requirements, and outline our future plans. Finally, we report feedback from ongoing demonstrations of the prototype system that supports our contention that VICC represents a unique solution to the incident management problem.

Value Creation of Mobile Services Through Presence: Designing Mobile Information and Entertainment Applications with Presence in Mind

“…We propose that the domain of mobile services design therefore provides an opportunity to describe how 'middle-range' theories of presence might be proposed that leverage the theoretical richness of presence research with the specific design characteristics of an application area such as mobile services. While acknowledging that presence is not a panacea for services design in mobility or any other application domain, nonetheless, we believe that our paper makes an important contribution to presence research by investigating how presence is applied in this specific domain, similar to recent work by Gyorfi et al (Gyorfi, Buhrke, Tarlton, Lopez, & Valliath, 2008) who examined the impact of presence in the area of incident management.…”

The Incident Command System: a literature review

“…Nevertheless, this process resulted in a total of 37 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles specifically on the topic of the ICS. Of the articles found, 18 did not report the findings of original research and hence were not included in the analysis (Wenger, Quarantelli, and Dynes, 1990;Stumph, 2001;Zane and Prestipino, 2004;Arnold, Paturas, and Rodoplu, 2005;Jacoby, 2005;Autry and Moss, 2006;Nicholson, 2006;Hansen, 2007;Moynihan, 2007Moynihan, , 2008bGyorfi et al, 2008;Nja and Rake, 2008;Madigan and Dacre, 2009;Adams et al, 2010;Phonburee et al, 2010;Andrew and Kendra, 2012;Fishbane, Kist, and Schieber, 2012;Tsai and Chi, 2012). Furthermore, eight reported the findings of original research related to specific aspects of, or issues pertaining to, the ICS but not to the overall system:…”