Mobile live video in emergency response: Its use and consequences

Abstract

Stacy Surla is the Bulletin’s associate editor for IA. She serves on the IA Institute Board of Directors and is a past chair of the IA Summit. She can be reached at T echnology-driven change of organizations in general and society at large seems to accelerate at an ever increasing speed. There will soon be few places that are not covered by various novel forms of information technology services. This is also true for the emergency and crisis response domain. In the last 10 years, professional response organizations have invested heavily in information technology to provide better means to communicate and to stay updated in dynamic response work. Robust radio systems and new interactive map systems are in place for vehicle navigation as well as in command center environments, giving the response actors detailed information about locations, buildings, potential risks and available resources. Now we also see the emergence of mobile live video solutions that allow professional response actors not only to tell someone about what is going on but also to really show what is happening on a specific location. These solutions are a consequence of the ongoing development and global diffusion of advanced consumer mobile devices. People in general can now broadcast live video at a low cost directly from their cell phones. Having live-video broadcasting capabilities on a mass-scale is both promising and perhaps disturbing. Someone might here add, Yes, but we have had CCTV [closed circuit television] for a while so what is new about this? Mobile live-video solutions differ in some respect quite sharply against previous fixed-video technology. By definition, mobile live video is mobile, which, in a response setting, means fundamental differences compared to fixed video infrastructure in terms of flexibility and availability. From now on, anyone can bring broadcasting capabilities to locations that were previously not covered. Having these capabilities embedded on user-friendly consumer devices and particularly on cell phones means that in many cases they could be readily available when a situation of interest comes about. A key consequence of this development is that almost any professional responder can now be equipped with an ordinary cell phone in order to capture events on an accident site and make these images available for higher incident management in command room settings. Studies of early adopters have shown that it is meaningful as well as appealing to be able to make the situation visible and to share aspects of the incident site with personnel in remote locations. These early explorations of live video use among response workers have been conducted using ordinary consumer cell phones with a dedicated, yet small, broadcasting application. When a user presses the broadcast button, the application connects to the Internet and starts sending a stream of pictures and audio. The video becomes instantly available on a protected website, often with the feature of having the video geographically positioned.