Abstract:
Nowadays, in Bangladesh Emergency Service Helpline is widely used for reporting
different kinds of emergencies. The advancement of technology has created the
opportunity to think about the betterment of this service for the future by incorporating
new modality like video-based calling for emergency helpline. The concept of
combining video-based calling brings the challenge that how video-based calling
system can be designed and how it can be beneficial or challenging. We observed the
system in Bangladesh to understand what the opportunities and limitations are there
currently. Along with observation, we conducted contextual interviews within
emergency response call center to investigate those issues. Our observation was focused
on the work practices of the call center as well as emergency dispatchers of the
emergency helpline in Bangladesh. We found that video calling can pull out important
contextual information about a situation helping emergency call attendants to overcome
challenges like inexact information, location, and awfulness of the incident or
communication issues. Challenges like control, privacy or information overload are also
there if the systems are not designed well enough. The outcome of this study clears the
opportunity, possibility, limitation and challenges of merging video-based calling apart
from voice call only. In the meantime, it figures out requirements and roadmap towards
a well-designed video-based calling system.
