Using Unconventional Awareness in Emergency Responses

Mobile workers using computing devices require context information to support their activities. Such information is usually delivered to computing devices through awareness mechanisms. Most of the current awareness mechanisms have been designed to support stationary computing and adapted to address mobile computing scenarios. These mechanisms typically use audio or visual messages, which have shown to be unsuitable to deliver context information to mobile workers, since the users attention is not focused on the device they are using. This article presents two studies that explore the use of unconventional awareness mechanisms, to provide context information to firefighters during urban emergencies responses. These studies analyze the use of the haptic and smell channels, as a way to implement direct and indirect capturers of the users´ attention. The obtained results indicate that awareness mechanisms that use these channels can be utilized to improve the information delivery during mobile activities. However, the use of the haptic channel seems to be much more effective and allows implementing a more diverse set of messages.