Improving the Internal Communication of an Emergency Rescue Service by Using Progressive Web Applications

The Austrian mountains are a wonderful place for hiking. Unfortunately, accidents can happen everywhere at any time. If people in the Austrian mountains are in distress, they can call the members of the Austrian Mountain Rescue Service for help. Especially the early phase of a rescue operation is crucial for the remaining process of the whole operation. The head of operation must collect, validate and distribute a vast amount of information. All individual rescuers must come together as fast and efficient as possible and need to get information from the head of operation and need to report their own participation to others who have joined the operation. The whole information flow must not slow down the approaching of the group to the lost or injured person needing their help. To improve information distribution, we designed a progressive web application with an easy to use, intuitive and adaptive user interface with the purpose to support a rescue team, especially during the early phase of rescue operations.