Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2020

Abstract

Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) requires careful communication between workers in different locations. To understand the contexts from which WSAR workers communicate and the challenges they face, we interviewed WSAR workers and observed a mock-WSAR scenario. Our findings illustrate that WSAR workers face challenges in maintaining a shared mental model. This is primarily done through distributed communication using two-way radios and cell phones for text and photo messaging; yet both implicit and explicit communication suffer. WSAR workers send messages for various reasons and share different types of information with varying levels of urgency. This warrants the use of multiple communication modalities and information streams. However, bringing in more modalities introduces the risk of information overload, and thus WSAR workers today still primarily communicate remotely via the radio. Our work demonstrates opportunities for technology to provide implicit communication and awareness remotely, and to help teams maintain a shared mental model even when synchronous realtime communication is sparse. Furthermore, technology should be designed to bring together multiple streams of information and communication while making sure that they are presented in ways that aid WSAR workers rather than overwhelming them.

Keywords

Awareness, Distributed collaboration, Outdoors, Search and rescue, Team communication

Discipline

Digital Communications and Networking | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Volume

4

First Page

1

Last Page

26

ISSN

2573-0142

Identifier

10.1145/3375190

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3375190

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