Results of the evaluation

The feedback from the firefighters was mostly positive. The FireTracker system and especially is user interface received positive feedback and was perceived as user-friendly. Based on the interviews and the questionnaire presented in section 9.2 the smoke divers found the visualizations to be too inaccurate to see their movements in the exercise building. The reason for this was that the mobile device received sig-nals from the other beacons placed in the exercise building. This caused the path in the visualization to be incorrect according to the smoke diver’s own perception of their movements. The instructors had a different view on the system. While sharing the same opinions on the visualization with the smoke divers, they found the system’s user interface to be user-friendly and intuitive. The instructor’s SUS scores were quite high, well over the accepted score of 68.

The most likely reason why the smoke divers scored considerably lower than the in-structors is due to their use of the system, or lack thereof. The Firetracker system is barely exposed to the smoke divers. They only interact with the mobile application and the visualizations, out of these two the visualization was the most important com-ponent. When it didn’t manage to represent their actual movement in the exercise building, the value of the system to them was considerably lowered.

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Chapter 11 Conclusion

This chapter presents a summary of the thesis, its contribution to research, and sug-gests what work should be done in the future.

11.1 Summary

Design Science Research has been used to develop an indoor positioning system to track firefighters position in cold smoke exercises. The development has been con-ducted in four iterations in a user-centered design process including several fire-fighters and firefighter instructors from SFRS, and IT experts in the heuristic eval-uation. By the end of the fourth iteration, the FireTracker System comprised 1) an Android application for tracking and registering data, 2) a back-end for calculat-ing, servcalculat-ing, and sending data, and 3) a web-application consisting of four modules:

Create Session-module, Open Session-module, User Manual-module and a Beacon Management-module.

The first iteration started with a preliminary sketch of the system. The requirements were based on the technical functions of the system. The sketches were worked into a low-fidelity prototype that was shown to two firefighter instructors at SFRS. The qualitative interview that followed assessed how the firefighters train for cold smoke exercises, what kind of roles the firefighters and instructors have, and what aspects of the exercise they give feedback on. The purpose was to find out which data was of importance to them and how the proposed prototype could be further expanded and which aspects of the training and exercise they would like to see implemented and visualized.

The second iteration marked the beginning of the development of the system. The structure of the system was revised and resulted in a new module, theCreate Session-module. By the end of the development in this iteration it was possible to create a new session, and opening a tracked session. The evaluation of the prototype developed in

this iteration consisted of a demonstration of the prototype and a semi-structured in-terview with one of SFRS’s training leader. The results showed that many of the design choices taken were accepted with some issues on displaying the session information, along with interpreting the graph. There was also expressed interest in a user guide.

The focus of third iteration was improving the usability of the system both in terms of the user interface and user experience, but also documentation. Therefore the system was redesigned, highlighting the important functions through visual cues, and introducing a new module, the User Manual-module. The heuristic evaluation of the prototype developed in this iteration uncovered multiple usability issues. The severity of the issues were ranked through the number of occurences. The evaluation also uncovered that it was difficult and confusing when trying to create a session.

In the fourth and final iteration, the focus was on improving the prototype based on feedback and issues from the evaluation in the previous iteration. A way of managing the the beacons was also needed, therefore the "Beacon Management" module was developed and added in this iteration.

The evaluation of the final prototype was performed with SFRS, where two smoke divers and two instructors participated. The evaluation results indicated that the sys-tem was easy to use and could potentially be used in a real cold smoke exercise. The evaluation also suggested that the tracking of the firefighter’s movements had to be more precise. The visualization in the final prototype was hard to interpret, SFRS said that it would be difficult to use it in an internal review of the exercise.

This research has shown that it is possible to develop an indoor positioning application to support insructors and firefighters in training exercise.

The data and work done in this research could be basis for further studies and de-velopment of similar indoor positioning systems. The system in itself can applied to scenarios where the tracking is taken place on a pre-defined site. It can also give an indication of which data is important to review when developing an indoor positioning systems and which effect it could have on the intended user group.

11.2 Limitations

This research had a number of limitations imposed on it, including:

• Beacons

• Quality of data from Beacons

• Time constraints

• Access to personnel from SFRS