Towards reducing the reaction time of emergency services through improved situation assessment

Our goal is to reduce the reaction time between an emergency call is received and help has been dispatched. The hypothesis is that the situation assessment of the operators can be improved by relying less on oral communication by enabling a smart phone application to send pre-registered and real-time updated information. We identify some challenges of how emergency situations are assessed by operators, discuss these challenges, and present a computer system that addresses these. As experiments with the aim of measuring the performance of the presented system in an operational setting are on-going, only some initial results are presented.