Digital tabletops for situational awareness in emergency situations

In major disasters it is common to install command posts close to the affected areas, in which a unified command, composed by people with different skills and goals, works together to resolve the situation. A major difficulty when supporting this command post is filtering the information that should be available and providing it at the right time to the right people. Through the application of Cognitive Task Analysis methods, we elicited how the work is really done and how the information is used by the command staff. Based on the results of this analysis, we present a set of requirements to support collaboration and information availability in this type of situation. We also present the initial development steps of a system prototype that will support the command post activities.