Designing Technology for Shared Communication and Awareness in Wilderness Search and Rescue

Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) is a carefully planned and organized team operation, requiring collaboration and information sharing between many volunteers who are spread out across various locations in the outdoors. Workers play a variety of roles, both on the ground and at a command post, and they need information and awareness specific to those roles. In our work, we are interested in understanding how this information is gathered and passed around, how it helps WSAR workers achieve their goals, and what challenges they face in sending and receiving information as well as in maintaining proper awareness. We conducted a study where we interviewed WSAR workers and observed a simulated search. Our findings reveal that WSAR workers face challenges in maintaining a shared mental model when radio and network connectivity are sparse. Our insights reveal opportunities for new communication modalities, such as (but not limited to) video communication, augmented reality, drones, and team-collaboration platforms to provide awareness and make communication and coordination easier remotely across various locations, but particularly between the field teams and Command workers. However, such technologies should also be designed to anticipate gaps in radio reception, and provide opportunities for workers to communicate asynchronously and see relevant ‘offline’ information in a context-dependent manner. We present design ideas that pursue some of these opportunities.