First 72 hours are very important after any humanitarian disaster as survival chances are high during that time. Survival conditions can be improved further by providing the right information (personalized) to the individuals stuck in a disaster and by helping those making right decisions. The Co-SURVIVOR idea aims at improvements in survival conditions at the modern sites with increase of usability of embedded systems via context and user sensitive, adaptive informational support. We propose personalized adviser for modern sites to improve survival conditions during onset disasters. Modern sites (airports, railway stations, universities, hotels, houses etc.) incorporate multiple embedded systems, to provide different kinds of information to their users. The information provided is highly complex. This complexity is on one side given by the information flow from the environment to the user, but also by the variety of services and applications in the site itself. These issues are recognized as one of the key factors, which impair the usability of the provided information, human performance and safety during a disastrous situation. The information that the individual needs to process, in order to make a decision often respects neither the user (mission, intentions, state, and skills) nor the situational (current events) context.
In order to provide an efficient and meaningful advice to an individual during a disastrous situation, the redundant data from heterogeneous sources should be managed, prioritized and presented in a convenient mode. The challenge is to keep the user in the loop of the control despite of emergency situations, user state and competence. Therefore, the need for a context and user sensitive informational support is required at modern sites specially to improve survival conditions during an emergency situation.
The progress in the research on context-awareness, semantic web technologies, mobile solutions, and visualization tools could allow
1) The virtual monitoring and control over a site with the effective, context-aware, and proactive information management
2) The adaptive presentation of the information to individuals with respect to their goals, preferences, skills, and mental state. Thus, an introduction of embedded intelligence to the management and targeted delivery of the information would allow timely monitoring and control of an emergency situation with an efficient decision support by selecting only relevant aspects of the information and displaying them to the individuals in the loop in a prompting way - in right moment, dosage and mode with respect to the individual’s state, skills and mental state.
The envisioned main streams of mobile solutions, like Bluetooth 4.0, more powerful processors, multimodality (e.g., voice interaction), universal and biometric IDs, in-door positioning, wearable mobile devices, and other could make possible the targeted delivery of information. Recent trends in wearable sensors may also contribute to an adaptive personalization of the information, making it more intelligible considering the current cognitive state and level of user activity.
To this end, Co-SURVIVOR idea is to develop a context-aware, adaptive system based on the dynamic models of the environment and user. The proposed system will allow real-time monitoring and control of the site. The system is in fact supposed to be sensitive to both
1) Events and changes in the environment,
2) Informational needs, mental state, and level of experience and competence of the targeted individual.
Thus, the system will co-evolve together with the user’s parameters in order to provide the most efficient and convenient informational support. With help of the latest visualization technologies and innovative approach to information management, the massive of information flow will be transformed into a targeted, meaningful advice for individuals to survive during a disastrous situation.