Designing Multimodal Interactive Dashboard of Disaster Management Systems

Disasters and crises are inevitable in this world. In the aftermath of a disaster, a society’s overall growth, resources, and economy are greatly affected as they cause damages from minor to huge proportions. Around the world, countries are interested in improving their emergency decision-making. The institutions are paying attention to collecting different types of data related to crisis information from various resources, including social media, to improve their emergency response. Previous efforts have focused on collecting, extracting, and classifying crisis data from text, audio, video, or files; however, the development of user-friendly multimodal disaster data dashboards to support human-to-system interactions during an emergency response has received little attention. Our paper seeks to fill this gap by proposing usable designs of interactive dashboards to present multimodal disaster information. For this purpose, we first investigated social media data and metadata for the required elicitation and analysis purposes. These requirements are then used to develop interactive multimodal dashboards to present complex disaster information in a usable manner. To validate our multimodal dashboard designs, we have conducted a heuristic evaluation. Experts have evaluated the interactive disaster dashboards using a customized set of heuristics. The overall assessment showed positive feedback from the evaluators. The proposed interactive multi-modal dashboards complement the existing techniques of collecting textual, image, audio, and video emergency information and their classifications for usable presentation. The contribution will help the emergency response personnel in terms of useful information and observations for prompt responses to avoid significant damage.