ensure - Enablement of Urban Citizen Support for Crisis Response

Crises and disasters require the rapid deployment of volunteers. In order to ensure a sufficient number of volunteers in the future, the project ensure developed concepts for a greater involvement of the population in disaster control. The focus was on citizens who, due to their professional knowledge, e.g., as caretaker, safety officer in companies or first aider, can specifically support the emergency forces.

HFC ensured the implementation of a user-centred design approach in the project. In doing so, we carried out all psychological investigations and evaluations. This entailed both the context and requirements analysis at the beginning of the project and the testing of the designed solutions (e.g., the ensure app) in the later project phases.

Within the framework of disaster management, different skills and abilities of the volunteers may be required: Hard skills, soft skills and emergency skills. Based on the developed crisis scenarios, we created different requirement profiles in order to identify suitable volunteers for the respective tasks. At the end of the project, HFC was responsible for the scientific monitoring of the field test and the evaluation of the human-technology interaction. This involved the prototypical development of the ensure app. Additionally, HFC planned and tested suitable education and training measures for the participating volunteers in order to expand their application possibilities and to be able to contact them for a wider range of tasks in the future.

The project was executed in the period 2013 - 2016 and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding code 13N12817).