Recovery Watcher: A Disaster Communication System for Situation Awareness and Its Use for Barrier-Free Information Provision

Since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 as well as the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, we have been aware of the needs for information processing for disaster response and recovery in Japan. This area of research has been led by researchers in the United States of America and Europe in terms of information processing for emergency management to a great extent. While we have had many natural disasters in Japan, only a few of the researchers in information processing have been working on this issue. From this perspective, we try to use our IT knowledge to implement systems to be used in disaster response and recovery so that we could see what could be usable. Moreover, we explored the needs and seeds for disaster information processing in Iwate, Japan. We interviewed local government officials, doctors and university administrators and found the needs for situation awareness for rescue. In this paper, we introduce our work on recovery watcher, designed primarily for reporting how recovery goes from disaster area, and its use for situation awareness in emergency response. Moreover, we show that those systems are usable for a support of barrier-free as well in terms of information provision.