Disaster Mitigation Using Interface Adaptation to Emotions - a Targeted Literature Review.

Public policy programs are set to manage the natural hazards’ risk and raise public awareness and preparedness. The advance in information technologies lets the disaster-handling bodies design and develop platforms and tools (e.g., visual questionnaires or serious games) to raise endangered people’s preparedness level. One primordial element which impacts human behavior and decision making during an incident is emotion. It seems to influence the preparedness level and risk perception towards an adaptation in behavior. So both research and industry communities can be interested in improving their emergency preparedness systems by considering real human behavior and emotions. This paper aims at better understanding the current state of the research on emotion-based disaster preparedness methods, channels, and tools and their mechanisms to adapt preparedness platforms and tools to emotions. It presents a targeted literature review which reinforced or revealed the following main findings: i) There are various individual (e.g., emotions) and contextual (e.g., communication channels) factors which affect citizens risk perception, ii) Humans’ future emotions are exposed to different biases. Moderating such biases can positively impact the risk perception, iii) The emotions lead to specific body signals that can be captured and used in disaster communication channels for preparedness, iv) Adapting the channels (e.g., preparedness platforms) can improve both systems’ usability and humans’ learning objectives. This study leads us to the idea of the need to use of emotions within the disaster preparedness platforms and tools.