Mobile augmented reality and context-awareness for firefighters

Abstract

Firefighters form action teams who work in challenging environments to solve complex situations. This type of work requires firefighters to have the relevant information about the emergency site and its surroundings in an efficient, effective way. We analyzed three focus groups from the evaluation of a previous mobile application to understand the needs of firefighters at an emergency site. Then, we developed an application that proposes two approaches to provide firefighters with quick access to data: an augmented reality interface and context-awareness to switch between views of the data. A preliminary evaluation with a small set of firefighters found the application to be useful to their work.