Chaparro-Acevedo, Marinés

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    Mobile computing: emergency management application
    (2012) Chaparro-Acevedo, Marinés; Lu, Kejie; College of Engineering; Rodríguez, Néstor J.; Borges, José; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Ríos, Isabel
    Over the past decade, people across the world have witnessed thousands of major emergencies and disasters, such as earthquakes, fires and car accidents. Usually, when these problems occur, the lack of information, the fear, and the nerves decrease the persons’ ability to organize ideas and to communicate basic information (e.g. their current position). Since mobile devices, especially Android devices, have been gaining a lot of popularity, this project presents a usable Android application aimed to help people before, during and after an emergency. Mostly, this project focuses on the usability aspects of the application. It was designed and implemented taking into consideration all information related to usability engineering for mobile devices. Once the prototype was developed, a heuristic evaluation was done and improvements to the application were made based on the results of that test. Finally, the application was tested with potential users. The results of the user tests show that the maximum time required by most of the users performing the tasks provided by the application was less than one minute; including people with no previous experience with Android devices. The main conclusion of this project is that even though there are a lot of initiatives from the government aimed to help people in case of an emergency, there is a big group that is not reached by those initiatives, mostly because of the information is not always available or because it is hard to find. A cell phone application is available almost at all time and, if developers take into consideration usability principles, the information could be found very fast, getting assistance from the emergency services could be easier and more lives could be saved.