FW-HTF-P: Augmenting First Responders' Cognitive Performance for Responses to Electric Vehicle Emergencies

The wide adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) provides significant benefits to society, including a cleaner environment, lower running costs, reduced noise pollution, and reduced carbon emissions. However, the adoption of EVs also brings challenges to the existing civil infrastructure system. For example, EV fires burn hotter, longer, and take more resources to extinguish than fires involving vehicles with traditional combustion engines. The first responders’ current work standards, training protocols, and training methods related to EV emergencies are dangerously outdated. In this project development award, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and multiple public agency partners will define and test the feasibility of an immersive and intuitive training platform that would augment first responders’ decision making when responding to EV-related fires. The knowledge generated from this study will provide valuable information to the first responder communities and help EV automakers design “responder friendly” EV systems. The objective of this Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) planning research project is to test the feasibility of the immersive training platform’s framework for future EV-related emergency responses. There are three major objectives: 1) To conduct a nationwide survey followed by focus group meetings to understand existing EV-related emergency response workflows; 2) To design and develop the framework of the immersive training platform that can augment first responders’ cognitive performance; and 3) To share the initial findings with researchers and other stakeholders to test the viability of the proposed training framework and formulate a detailed roadmap for future work. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.