Recovery Watcher: A Disaster Communication System for Situation Awareness and Its Use for Barrier-Free Information Provision

Abstract

Since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 as well as the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, we have been aware of the needs for information processing for disaster response and recovery in Japan. This area of research has been led by researchers in the United States of America and Europe in terms of information processing for emergency management to a great extent. While we have had many natural disasters in Japan, only a few of the researchers in information processing have been working on this issue. From this perspective, we try to use our IT knowledge to implement systems to be used in disaster response and recovery so that we could see what could be usable. Moreover, we explored the needs and seeds for disaster information processing in Iwate, Japan. We interviewed local government officials, doctors and university administrators and found the needs for situation awareness for rescue. In this paper, we introduce our work on recovery watcher, designed primarily for reporting how recovery goes from disaster area, and its use for situation awareness in emergency response. Moreover, we show that those systems are usable for a support of barrierfree as well in terms of information provision.

Issues in the Use of the Recovery Watcher for Situation Awareness in Disaster and Inclusive Communications

“…It takes long to recover and reconstruct the towns and cities at disaster area, but the interests into such recovery and reconstructions would be faded out outside the disaster area as time goes by. On the other hand, we envisage the system to be used by the first responders at the early stage of disaster management cycle such as emergency response and even at the rescue phase [5].…”

“…Indeed, situation awareness is required for such inclusive support. We reported the use of our system for barrier free support for the people with disabilities as well as their supporters to find out the situation of the university campus [5]. We firstly created an accessibility map based on OSM with a geotagged photograph sharing tool, Mapillary [19] and Wheelmap [20] including the information on slopes and toilets [21,22].…”

“…From this perspective, we try and implement systems to be used in disaster response and recovery so that we could see what could be usable at disaster. One of them is Recovery Watcher, an information sharing system to keep people being aware of how recovery goes in the disaster area by reporting images from the disaster area [5]. We reported its use for barrier-free information provision [6].…”