Designing an Icon-based Mobile Communication Tool

The important issue in an emergency situation is how to maintain communication and coordinate responder agencies that are specialized in different areas, like police, firefighters, and mediacal services. Among those agencies, communication is essential in policing for not only maintaining public safety, but also for taking the proper action in a timely manner. Enormous advances in the IT field have been seen in the last decades, and are promising new improvements in the area of communication. Combining computers and mobile phones as handheld devices having communication capabilities, and increasing their hardware and software capabilities, for example, opens a new area in terms of improving communications of the responders. In spite of these advances in the mobile technology field, a small screen display is still a big concern, because people in the field need a system that can be easily manipulated. To overcome the limitations of handheld devices, a new concept has been proposed in this book: using icons to facilitate writing and sending messages.