Past and future emergency response information systems

Turoff, Murray

doi:10.1145/505248.505265

Cited by 181 publications

(108 citation statements)

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“…Over the years, many ICT-enhanced support tools, categorized as Disaster Management Systems (DMSs), have been developed (e.g., [8], [20,21], [25,26,27,28], [30]), aimed at supporting institutions, formal organizations, and rescuers in one or more phases of the emergency management process: besides systems mainly useful for prevention and mitigation (like, e.g., NHSS 1 ), other DMSs are designed to support also management and coordination of resources and rescuers during response and recovery (e.g., [21], [30]). A notable example is given by the suite of products offered by the Sahana Foundation 2 [8]: in particular, Eden is a configurable platform, allowing easy integration with maps, with the goal of coordinating and improving the efficiency of rescuers activities through organization registry, project tracking, messaging, scenario, and repositories for human resources, inventory and assets, while Vesuvius, focused on disaster preparedness and response needs of the medical community, contributes to family reunification and assistance with hospital triage.…”

Section: Do Existing Ict Proposals Support Social Recovery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements and Open Issues for ISs Supporting Dynamic Community Bonding in Emergency Situations

Mascio

Gobbo

Tarantino

2015

Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation

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Abstract. Studies show that in emergency situations, like in the aftermath of natural disasters, people tend to self-organize into so-called ephemeral organizations and transitional communities based on common problems, common places, etc. Strict interactions among victims, fundamental to strengthen such small communities, may be efficiently supported by a new generation of mobile-empowered disaster management systems based on the social networking approach, with crowd-generated and geo-referenced data. In this paper we discuss how a shift of perspective in the interaction, conceptual, logical and physical models adopted for the social network can efficiently support the dynamic bonding/de-bonding/re-bonding of communities that emerge based on alliances around shared problems and/or objectives.Keywords: social network, interaction, emergency management. IntroductionAs the European Environmental Agency (EEA) recently reported [13], the impact of disasters due to natural hazards and technological accidents increased in Europe in the period 1998-2009, with nearly 100000 fatalities, more than 11 million people affected, and economic losses of about EUR 150 billion. In the observed period extreme temperature events caused the highest number of human fatalities, flooding and storms were the most costly hazards, while earthquakes ranked second in terms of fatalities and third in terms of overall losses. EEA observes that the increase in losses can be explained, to a large extent, by higher levels of human activity and accumulation of economic assets in hazard-prone areas and underlines the necessity of measures for risk reduction and management. Although some EU policies have already been adopted or initiated, more effort is needed to implement an Integrated Risk Management approach that includes prevention, preparedness, response and recovery, the four main phases of a cyclic emergency management process [1]. The study discussed in this paper refers in particular to the support that ICT, and Information Systems (ISs) in particular, may provide to response and recovery after natural disasters that cause a massive failure in essential infrastructures and the disruption of the integrity of the affected community. The subject of social and psychological impact of disasters is widely debated in the literature (e.g., [3,4], [6], [14,16,17], [23,24], [29]) and it is generally agreed that one of the most relevant effect of a disaster is the relaxation or, in the worst case, the disruption of the social linkages upon which a community is based. Immaterial damages are less evident (though often more relevant) than material ones and may remain unnoticed for a long period of time. It has to be noticed that, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the attention of rescuers is usually captured by the material needs of the victims, leaving sociological and psychological needs usually not addressed or addressed by means of standard protocols unable to reach the entire population.This standard approach for facing emergency is mirror...

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Section: Do Existing Ict Proposals Support Social Recovery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements and Open Issues for ISs Supporting Dynamic Community Bonding in Emergency Situations

Mascio

Gobbo

Tarantino

2015

Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation

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“…Typical examples include emergency management systems for containing chemical and nuclear pollutants (Gheorghe and Vamanu 2001), for building fire safety (Upadhyay et al 2009, Han et al 2010, and for firefighters' training (Schurr et al 2006, Massaguer et al 2006. It has been widely recognized in emergency communities (Carver and Turoff 2007;Manoj and Baker 2007;Prasanna et al 2007;Turoff 2002;Yang 2007;Yang et al 2009a, b;Upadhyay et al 2009) that on-site dynamic information is critical to emergency response and will assist in improving the initial key decision making. Traditional emergency management systems, which only provide information that is precompiled and prepared beforehand rather than being generated in real time, will not be appropriate for unforeseen highly dynamic incidents such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and terrorist attack.…”

Section: On-site Emergency Response Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Principles of Integrated Information Platform for Emergency Responses: The Case of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Yang

Yuan

2012

Information Systems Research

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T his paper investigates the challenges faced in designing an integrated information platform for emergency response management and uses the Beijing Olympic Games as a case study. The research methods are grounded in action research, participatory design, and situation-awareness oriented design. The completion of a more than two-year industrial secondment and six-month field studies ensured that a full understanding of user requirements had been obtained. A service-centered architecture was proposed to satisfy these user requirements. The proposed architecture consists mainly of information gathering, database management, and decision support services. The decision support services include situational overview, instant risk assessment, emergency response preplan, and disaster development prediction. Abstracting from the experience obtained while building this system, we outline a set of design principles in the general domain of information systems (IS) development for emergency management. These design principles form a contribution to the information systems literature because they provide guidance to developers who are aiming to support emergency response and the development of such systems that have not yet been adequately met by any existing types of IS. We are proud that the information platform developed was deployed in the real world and used in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

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“…Technology has been partially adapted to emergency scenarios (Turoff, 2002): improvements in communication networks; support for first responders by means of PDAs and intelligent cell phones and GIS-applications presenting maps that show the locations of all emergency personnel in the emergency area. Recently many works exploring mobile capabilities to support communication among emergency responders and between them and the Command and Control appeared (Ochoa et al 2007;Yuan and Deltor 2005;Lachner and Hellwagner 2008).…”

Section: Emergency Response Information Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The dynamic and uncertain nature of the response prevent the complete definition of the actions to be performed, the time they will take place, the resources needed and their performers (Turoff 2002). The complexity may be augmented as the professional involved often execute their tasks When things go wrong in emergency management, the reasons are generally related to breakdowns in information, communication, and/or coordination (Dykstra 2003).The problem of lacking information may be mitigated, or even solved, through the use of information technologies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Assessment of Information Technology Maturity in Emergency Response Organizations

et al. 2011

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Abstract. In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations.

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Past and future emergency response information systems

Abstract: Past and future objectives remain the same in crises, providing relevant communities collaborative knowledge systems to exchange information.

Cited by 181 publications

References 1 publication

Requirements and Open Issues for ISs Supporting Dynamic Community Bonding in Emergency Situations

Requirements and Open Issues for ISs Supporting Dynamic Community Bonding in Emergency Situations

Design Principles of Integrated Information Platform for Emergency Responses: The Case of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

The Assessment of Information Technology Maturity in Emergency Response Organizations

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