Xiaodong Jiang, Nicholas Chen, Jason Hong, Kevin Wang, Leila Takayama, and James Landay

International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive)

January 2004

Based on an extensive field study of current firefighting practices, we have developed a system called Siren to support tacit communication between firefighters with multiple levels of redundancy in both communication and user alerts. Siren provides a foundation for gathering, integrating, and distributing contextual data, such as location and temperature. It also simplifies the development of firefighting applications using a peer-to-peer network of embedded devices through a uniform programming interface based on the in-formation space abstraction. As a proof of concept, we have developed a proto-type context-aware messaging application in the firefighting domain. We have evaluated this application with firefighters and they have found it to be useful for improving many aspects of their current work practices.