Engineering Commons^™

Remote Communication In Wilderness Search And Rescue: Implications For The Design Of Emergency Distributed-Collaboration Tools For Network-Sparse Environments, Brennan Jones, Anthony Tang, Carman Neustaedter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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 …