Moving Beyond Traditional Emergency Response Notification with VoiceXML

Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, Apr 2009 by Thomas, Manoj A, Andoh-Baidoo, Francis Kofi, Redmond, Richard, Yoon, Victoria Y

Abstract:

This paper describes a Geographical Information Systems (GIS)-based response management architecture that combines GIS capabilities with web-based voice translation technologies such as VoiceXML to effectively coordinate the emergency response notification activities. The paper highlights some of the critical shortcomings of existing emergency response systems and proposes an architecture that addresses these limitations. The proposed architecture uses newer technologies to develop a seamless response notification system that requires minimal human intervention. The EVResponse is an application built around this architecture to provide real-time reporting capabilities to both decision makers and first response units.

Keywords: Geographic Information Systems, Emergency Response Notification System, EVResponse, Web Services, Decision Support Systems, VoiceXML

INTRODUCTION

Federal, state and local governmental agencies have a wide range of responsibilities in managing and responding to various natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tsunamis, and unnatural emergency situations, including bioterrorism attacks and toxic spills. Complexity associated with the handling of emergencies that typically cover wide geographic areas dictate the need for powerful computer software to enable effective and quick dissipation of timely notification to the affected areas. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) -based applications allow the referencing and analysis of spatial data and are heavily used by decision makers to provide critical crisis-specific support. In this regard, several GIS-based emergency response systems have been developed to assist governmental agencies to analyze, manage and respond to crisis such as floods, forest fire and chemical spills (Fuhrmann et al. 2003; Gunes and Kovel 2000; Keenan 1997; Mennecke, Crossland, and Dangemond 1994; Stone 2004). Emergency Response Management usually revolves around the activities immediately prior to, during and post crisis, and focused mainly on saving lives and minimizing damages to property (Gunes and Kovel 2000). In crisis management contexts, the timeliness of a response may be determined with reference to a fixed instant in the form of an absolute action threshold. This establishes the last possible point in time where any solution is available. Once an action threshold is passed, a crisis is no longer containable; whatever adverse consequences a problem portends are thereafter inescapable. Timeliness and access to real-time updates of the situational factors in the affected zone play a critical role in ensuring effective crisis management decisions. The break down of emergency management coordination processes in the aftermath of recent disasters such as the SARS outbreak in Southeast Asia (Devadoss and Pan 2004; Xue and Liang 2004), the Tsunami destruction along the pacific rim (Van de Walle and Turroff 2007), the hurricane Katrina devastations on the Gulf Coast and even most recently, the Virginia Tech Shooting incident (Collins 2007), re-emphasizes the importance of research on the design, development and evaluation of effective emergency systems (Van de Walle and Turroff 2007).

The combination of communication and coordination is key to an effective response system to ensure timeliness, correctness and clarity of response notification to the people, households and businesses in the affected area (Manoj and Baker 2007; Yuan and Detlor 2005). An effective emergency response system should support the efforts to mitigate the impact of disaster, enhance preparedness and assist in responding to disasters with follow-up and recovery plans. Such a system should ideally help to accurately plot the geographic location of the disaster based on user inputs, notify first responders and provide detailed information about the crisis to the emergency response planners. Furthermore, the system should have reporting features to help incident tracking and reporting for post crisis analysis and risk assessment. Post crisis analysis is a core activity undertaken by emergency management teams so that historical incident data can be used to improve strategies to handle similar crisis in future.

Although existing emergency response systems incorporate many of the above features, they still lack in robustness to reach out to the common mass effectively and convey critical life saving and property conserving notification messages (Gunes and Kovel 2000; Stone 2004). Currently most emergency response systems in place are unidirectional. Whether it is a pole bellowing a siren or a sophisticated reverse 911 systems channeling pre-recorded messages (Weaver, Gruntfest, and Levy 2000) to residents to warn of an impending emergency, there is no real means to interact or analyze responses received from the affected people. In addition, most existing systems require extensive human intervention to communicate evacuation plans and notifications to the communities most likely to be affected by the crisis. Since notifications are best communicated via telephones, the communication process is slow, time consuming and places high demand on the personnel. The situational complexity is usually made worse due to the immediate unpredictability of the effects of the crisis as well as the inability to provide comprehensive spatial information (operational - such as spatial prediction of the coverage area following a toxic aerosol leak and, tactical - such as cordon traffic from a particular direction) to the first response teams in a real-time manner.