Abstract

The Emergency services' officers play a major role in keeping our safety during crisis and disasters. That is why it is primordial that the First Responders can and should intervene to resolve the incidents within a short period of time.

This Bachelor thesis offers a digital interface to assist the Emergency services' officers during the intervention in progress, by providing different tools to accelerate the communication between the officers and exchange of commands.

Project Description & Crucial Research 

The project consist of developing an application that runs on tablet-like devices, which motivated us to pay closer attention to the hardware limitations and precisely memory management.

Additionally, as the main goal of this project is to invite the Emergency services' officers to switch from a paper map and magnetic Tactical Graphic, to a digital map and digital tools, the most important aspect was to offer exactly the same possibilities inside the digital tool as the real life traditional methods. Thus we had to investigate the following key points and integrate them as good as possible:

1. Minimizing stored data on the device while rendering the map.
2. Used colors by the First Responders, and their designation. 
3. Used Tactical Graphics by the First Responders and  the meaning behind their different colors, symbols, and characters.
4. Used tactical gestures in windows devices and how intuitive they can be for non smart gadgets' users.

Conclusion & Implemented Features

The developed application provides a map with an abstract layout and bright colors to enhance the overview of the incident site. Furthermore we tackled the storage limitations by dynamically generating our map and never storing its information during rendering. For this matter we used a customized map provider tool, namely Mapbox.

Working hand in hand with TUM-Feuerwehr and specifically M.Eng. Hammann Claudius, the presented interface implements the discussed and elaborated requirements, such as:

1. Ability to distinguish type of incident and mark the dangerous zone, by providing different settings for the used brush to contour and shade the zone. These settings consist of: a palette containing all used colors by the Emergency services' officers, four different sizes for the brush and two different types, namely a contour brush and a filling brush.
2. Easily navigate back to the marked area and possibility to add a textual note to it, modify it and delete it.
3. Ability to create customizable Tactical Graphics for different types of incidents, intervention methods and Emergency services' officers.
4.  Quick access to pre-combined Tactical Graphics, by providing textually annotated and color coded folders.
5. Possibility to remove or reposition the already placed Tactical Graphics on the map.
6. Highlighting specific buildings by changing their color.
7. Offering different views, namely 2D and 3D view.
8. Possibility to visualize and track the gears dispatched following the commands of the Tactical Graphics in the 3D view.
9. Intuitive controls to navigate the map and interact with the interface.

B_Games_200514_hellali_imen.pdf