The most recent contribution to the communications technology hub comes from Atish Gonsalves, founder of Mobilize.life, a platform to create mixed reality mobile games.
In his article, Gonsalves explores how emerging technology can be used for training humanitarian staff to respond effectively to the increasingly complex needs that arise following disasters, particularly when responding to security incidents and executing emergency plans. Creating realistic exercises during the training is crucial to ensure that participants respond effectively in similar real-life scenarios.
Mobile devices can play an important role in crisis situations involving role-playing. Although they don’t match the immersive feeling a participant gets when entering a real-world simulation, mobile devices are well suited to orchestrate a flow of events through a ‘mixed-reality’ environment, allowing the learners to move between virtual tasks assigned on the device and the physical environment.
Applying Serious Gaming to Humanitarian Security: A Framework for Mixed-Reality Training. Gonsalves, A. (2015)
Read the full article
About the author:
Atish Gonsalves is the founder of Mobilize.life. He has led exciting projects and teams at DisasterReady.org, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Atish has over 15 years of experience in developing innovative learning and technology solutions and has worked and lived in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and the United States. Atish graduated from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
About the hub:
In October 2014, the European Interagency Security Forum (EISF) launched a knowledge hub on communications technology and security risk management. The first publication of this project brought together 17 authors who analysed in 11 articles how communications technology is changing the operational environment, the ways in which communications technology is creating new opportunities for humanitarian agencies to respond to emergencies, and the impact that new programmes have on how we manage security.
Visit the communications technology hub
The hub aims to provide an outlet for researchers and practitioners to make original and policy-relevant research available to the humanitarian community. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch with the editor of the series at eisf-research@eisf.helpful.ws
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