Mobile AR Interface for Instruction-Based Disaster Preparedness Guidelines

Disaster preparedness guidelines help citizens protect themselves against disasters. Regardless, the general public has been found not reading them. Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces are known to improve knowledge transfer in studies of education, industry, and elderly assistance. However, they achieve this by creating specific interfaces for their users, not the general public. To test the performance of these interfaces for general public guidance, we designed and implemented a novel AR-assisted disaster prevention guideline that leverages object detection models to identify targets of disaster preparedness advice. We compared our interface against a traditional paper-based preparedness guide by testing their usability, task load, and capacity to make users aware of their environmental hazards. We were able to observe the type of media influencing the performance of the subjects in the test according to their age group, suggesting that minors and seniors are performing worse than adults in guidelines intended for the general public. This study highlights the importance of guidance alternatives for the young and the less technology-aware population, contributing to the under-explored area of AR interfaces for the general public.