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.