User interface to support situation awareness in forest fires

Abstract

Situation Awareness (SAW) is a cognitive process defined as the perception of elements and events in a volume of time and space, the understanding of the current situation and the projection of its future state. SAW is a pre-requisite for decision-making in dynamic and complex, and therefore errors in SAW are an acknowledge source of mistakes in several domains, including emergency response. In this domain, the state of the art of situation assessment systems propose process of information fusion with User Interface (UI) to improve the cognitive fit between system and human, and thus support acquisition of SAW. However, few systems model a proactive participation of the user in this process, especially considering information quality and its use to parameterize the fusion. Furthermore, these systems depend on information originated by human intelligence (HUMINT), which naturally has a higher level of uncertainty. Therefore, this project propose the design and development of a UI for the command and control of the DF100Fogo system that will focus on two points: a mechanism for information visualization that represents quality indexes; the capture and use of conversations among team members as an important source of information on the current situation. It is expected that the interpretation and analysis of the communication (a HUMINT information) through verbal protocols will act as trigger of routines to refine the current situation being process by the system. A study case will be done using real forest fire information that were reported by the community application or the firefighter application (both are part of the DF100Fogo system). To evaluations will be made, the first to measure usability and the second to measure the level of SAW of the users. (AU)