A THOROUGH STUDY ON THE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF VIDEO CALLING FOR EMERGENCY SITUATIONS IN CONTEXT OF BANGLADESH

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.