Title
Improving situation awareness in crisis response teams: An experimental analysis of enriched information and centralized coordination.
Abstract
In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of information processing and information sharing in emergency response teams to analyze their effect on the teams’ situation awareness: (1) we enrich raw incoming information by adding a summary of the information received, and (2) we channel all incoming information to a central coordinator who then decides upon further distribution within the team. The effect of both interventions is investigated through a controlled experiment with experienced professional responders. Our results show distinctly different effects for information enrichment and centralization, both for the teams and for the coordinators within the team. While the interaction effects of both conditions cannot be discerned, it is apparent that processing non-enriched information and non-centralized information sharing leads to a worse overall team situation awareness. Our work suggests several implications for the design of emergency response management information systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.001
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Fast-burning crisis,Crisis response,Information sharing,Situation awareness,Coordination
Journal
95
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1071-5819
1
0.36
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bartel Van de Walle134349.52
Bert Brugghemans210.36
Tina Comes33914.07