In the domain of emergency management, in addition to the constant technical skill-upgrade required by the nature of the humanitarian context, the importance of an appropriate training is widely recognized. In particular, giving responders information technology skills so that they are well prepared to address health, security and managerial concerns represents a key factor by which the goal of an efficient and effective humanitarian emergency response can be pursued. In this paper we propose the adoption of augmented reality mobile interfaces to enhance the training efficacy for on-site crisis preparedness activities. The system we propose originated from the idea to allow trainees to exploit Augmented Reality (AR) interaction and become quickly familiar with the mobile technology adopted today in emergency response activities

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This article introduces a new soft keyboard, named Tap and Slide, specifically designed for mobile devices. The new interaction method, on which the keyboard is based, allows performing text entry operations in a very small space, so minimizing the space required. To evaluate the keyboard from a usability point of view, three studies were performed: the first verifies whether the subjects’ abilities expressed in terms of technological knowledge may specifically provide advantages in performing text entry operations, the second tries to understand the ease of learning of the keyboard considering both accuracy and efficiency in task execution, and the third analyzes the performance of the soft keyboard in comparison with the more common QWERTY soft keyboard

Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been\ud \ud developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user\ud \ud interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy

In the last decade, a growing interest has been devoted to the management of data referring to geographic scenarios. However, the attention of recent research has been focused on discrete data disregarding continuous data, because of their intrinsic complexity. In this paper, we introduce an extension of a spatial SQL, which provides users with the capability to pose queries about both discrete and continuous data.