Title
Inclusive access to emergency services: an action research project focused on hearing-impaired citizens.
Abstract
In case of emergency, hearing-impaired people are not always able to access emergency services, and hence, they do not have equal access to social support and infrastructure. In this work, we describe an action research study that undertakes the development and evaluation of a system aiming to meet the communication needs of hearing-impaired citizens in cases of emergency. The system consists of (1) a mobile application that records and sends the details of an emergency event and (2) a central management system that handles these calls from the operation center at the emergency services. The system was completed in four cycles of design, development and evaluation with the involvement of 74 hearing-impaired users and three officers from the Cyprus Police (Emergency Response Unit). Results demonstrated how the system can provide easy and direct access to emergency services, without the need of any intermediate, enabling the inclusion of these citizens in a critical process such as the response to an emergency.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10209-016-0509-5
Universal Access in the Information Society
Keywords
Field
DocType
Technology for hearing-impaired people, Inclusive citizen participation, Inclusive design, Action research, Emergency services
World Wide Web,Computer science,Universal design,Action research,Social support,Multimedia,Management system,Process management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
4
1615-5297
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vaso Constantinou111.70
Andri Ioannou27721.51
Paloma Diaz310519.32