Temporary Contact Management within Emergency Response Settings

Abstract

Efficient response to emergencies is important to minimize their consequences and requires a high degree of knowledge and skill from the responders. Situation awareness and sensemaking are key cognitive processes used by emergency responders to handle these situations. Supporting these processes increases the efficiency of the response work. This study will explore how to improve these processes for an emergency response organization through visualization and information-sharing of external actor’s contact information within an incident. The paper presents the development and testing of a prototype that will enable managing this data by one organization. The outcome of this study shows that providing a tool for managing temporary contact-information in large scale emergencies supports the cognitive processes required for efficient emergency response work.