Towards Ubiquitous Emergency Management Systems

This contribution introduces an emergency management system design based on platform-independent multi-touch technology as an interactive, ubiquitous front-end technology for pervasive sensor and communication components. This combination aims at supporting decision making and analyses during all phases of the emergency management process. From stakeholders providing planning information beforehand to end users communicating via their mobile phones or even distributed sensor networks, the system taps into a wide range of data sources and offers a comprehensive, digestible view on the data using multi-touch surfaces in the operations centre. In order to integrate legacy data sources and to keep the system open for the integration of additional data sources in the future, a model based approach is used. Demonstration versions of the system’s components based on current multi-touch frameworks and hardware as well as mobile apps and communities are also presented.