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Broadcasting emergency notifications during disasters is crucial, particularly in Monroe County, NY, which is home to one of the largest per capita Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) populations in the United States. However, text alerts may not effectively reach DHH individuals who are in a state of reduced responsiveness, like sleep, placing them at great risk. This paper presents cloud-based platform designed to deliver emergency alerts with visual and haptic feedback. A prototype utilizing an off-the-shelf IoT device demonstrates how alerts can be received via vibration and light-based feedback. The platform aims to be accessible to DHH community, providing its own solutions to maintain haptic devices and receive critical alerts in real time. This work contributes to the literature on IT solutions for bridging the communication gap between text-based alerts and intuitive visual/haptic communication, enhancing emergency response readiness for the DHH community, ultimately improving safety and potentially saving lives. 

Emergency Management (EM) strategies often overlook the communication challenges faced by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community, limiting their involvement in disaster preparedness and response. This paper introduces SafeSigns, a geospatially enabled toolkit designed to bridge this gap by facilitating hazard reporting and communication by and for DHH individuals. By integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with user-centered design, SafeSigns empowers users to report incidents, identify hazards, and coordinate with Public Safety (PS) officials. Unlike traditional EM technologies, which rarely prioritize accessibility, SafeSigns leverages ArcGIS Pro, React Vite, and TypeScript to ensure usability, efficiency, and accessibility. This research represents one of the first ISCRAM-related efforts to explicitly include DHH communities in EM. Findings support a more inclusive and participatory approach, demonstrating the significance of geospatial solutions in enhancing community resilience. Future work will refine SafeSigns through real-world testing and explore applicability to other vulnerable populations in disaster response. 

Household resilience to natural hazards is a critical issue facing society with the advent of climate change. In this work, we developed one of the first household natural hazard resilience geospatial models for Rwanda designed to understand household resilience at detailed spatial resolutions. We evaluated indicators within the model through empirical fieldwork using an easy-to-deploy survey on Android tablets. To the best of our knowledge, the work presented here is innovative as it is some of the first to use geospatial technology-based surveys to conduct household-level natural disaster resilience surveys in Rwanda. Select results presented in this paper indicated that household vulnerabilities and subsequent resilience generally matched existing district-level risk mapping of Rwanda. However, our work went beyond existing risk mapping to understand individual household perceptions of resilience. Respondents generally reported a mix of positive and negative drivers of household resilience. Security vis-à-vis natural disasters and economic situation was perceived as very insecure, healthcare and education were very secure, and utilities, food and water, and housing were generally perceived as insecure but not as insecure as economic situation and security to future disasters. There is much more that can be understood in terms of household resilience as it relates to many factors of household resiliency in our model including physical vulnerabilities, financial capacity, information access, technological capacity, and most importantly, resilience perceptions. 

Hurricane Harvey caused massive damage and necessitated the need for identification of areas under high risk. During Harvey, the city of Houston received more than 77000 3-1-1 calls for assistance. Due to damage caused to the infrastructure, it became difficult to handle and respond to the crisis. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a vital technology to assist with real-time disaster monitoring. In this regard, for this work-in-progress paper, we investigated if a correlation could be found between 3-1-1 data calls made during Hurricane Harvey and aerial images captured during the event. Specifically, we were interested to see if 3-1-1 data could be ground-truthed via hot spot analysis. Our preliminary results indicate that visual representation of 3-1-1 call data can aid in analyzing the expected areas of high traffic of calls for assistance and plan an effective way to manage resources. Future work will involve more in-depth analysis of combined 3-1-1 call data with satellite imagery using image classification techniques. 

The need for improvement of societal disaster resilience and response efforts was evident after the destruction caused by the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We present a novel conceptual framework for improving disaster resilience through the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience. Our framework is implemented via Project Lily Pad, a serious geogame based on our conceptual framework, serious game case studies, interviews and real-life experiences from 2017 Hurricane Harvey survivors in Dickinson, TX, and an immersive hurricane-induced flooding scenario. The game teaches a four-fold set of skills relevant to spatial thinking and disaster resilience, including reading a map, navigating an environment, coding verbal instructions, and determining best practices in a disaster situation. Results of evaluation of the four skills via Project Lily Pad through a “think aloud” study conducted by both emergency management novices and professionals revealed that the game encouraged players to think spatially, can help build awareness for disaster response scenarios, and has potential for real-life use by emergency management professionals. It can be concluded from our results that the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience, as implemented via Project Lily Pad and our evaluation results, demonstrated the wide range of possibilities for using serious geogames to improve disaster resilience spatial thinking and potentially save lives when disasters occur.