LifeRescue Software Prototype for Supporting Emergency Responders During Fire Emergency Response: A Usability and User Requirements Evaluation

For an efficient emergency response, emergency responders (ERs) should exchange information with one another to obtain an adequate understanding and common operational picture of the emergency situation. Despite the current developments on information systems, many ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information as the data is heterogeneous and distributed at different places and due to security and privacy barriers. As a result, ERs are unable to coordinate well and to make good decisions. Therefore, to overcome these difficulties, a web-based application called LifeRescue was developed for supporting easy information access during emergency search and rescue operation. The goal of the paper is to test the developed LifeRescue system against the user requirements. We conducted a workshop with nine participants i.e., six ERs from fire protection service and three ERs from police service. First, the workshop session started with prototype demonstration and trial, then a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire was given, and finally a semi-structured interview was conducted to collect data on the user requirements validation. The results presented in this paper combine both qualitative and quantitative data from a semi-structured interview and a survey conducted after the prototype demonstration and trail. The interview results indicate that our developed system fulfils the user requirements of 6 ERs from fire protection and 3 ERs from police services. Furthermore, the survey results indicate that the participants would like to use our developed system frequently as they felt that it was easy for them to get access to information with a simplified view.