Emergency Response Planning and Training through Interactive Simulation and Visualization with Decision Support

Teams of first responders work together to effectively manage a community-wide crisis. Traditionally, key groups such as police, fire, and medical are each trained for specific emergency procedures. Emergency response teams design training exercises to augment an individual´s cognition associated with performing time critical roles. The aggregation of all individual cognition, distributed through communications, suggests a situation awareness that an incident commander requires to perform optimal decision-making. We are developing a computer-supported simulation environment with a decision support tool called the RimSim, to facilitate emergency response planning and training of first responders. We modularize RimSim for synchronous multi-player use or asynchronous individual use with simulated participants. Through interactive computer- supported role-play with shared visualizations, we are able to study distributed cognition with a long-term goal of identifying opportunities for improving information management during emergency response. We aim to improve mindful distributed cognition for first responders during emergency response to natural and man-made crises.