CIVIC-PG Track B: Bridging the Gap between Essential Emergency Resources and Services and the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community in Monroe County NY: A Geospatial-Visual Approach

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This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project is a vision to identify and bridge specific gaps in essential emergency resources and services for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community in Monroe County, New York. Situated within Monroe County, Rochester New York is home to the largest per capita population of DHH people in the US. Stage 1 pilot project activities will be undertaken between three partners - (1) the Rochester Institute of Technology and the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, (2) the Monroe County Office of Emergency Management, and (3) the Rochester Recreation Club for Deaf. The project represents a unique coupling of academic research with the DHH community and emergency management. Project goals include identifying DHH community emergency service gaps, creating and evaluating DHH emergency communication tools, identifying educational pathways for incorporation of knowledge about the DHH into emergency management and geospatial technology practice, and identifying pathways for the DHH to become part of the emergency management STEM workforce and volunteer efforts. To the best knowledge, this would be the first NSF research effort to directly address the topic of bridging the gap between emergency services and DHH communities. Results will be generalizable to other community contexts with special needs populations beyond Monroe County NY for broader project national impact and legacy.Issues related to the DHH and emergency management cycle have received little attention from emergency management researchers and discussion in the academic literature. Project research questions designed to scale from a planning project to a Stage 2 rapid deployment project are: R1: What are the spatial relationships between the DHH community and hazards that may reveal specific gaps in emergency services for the DHH?; R2: What are the messaging and communication needs of the DHH community during all phases of the emergency management cycle? R3: What pedagogical practice is needed for education and workforce development of emergency management practitioners on the needs of the DHH community during all phases of the emergency management cycle? Methods used include (R1) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) machine learning to compare DHH populations with hazards for event prediction, decision making, and targeted messaging, (R2) 3D modeling to simulate how signage can be used in time-sensitive emergency situations where the DHH cannot hear warnings and user-centered design with the DHH community on graphical emergency communication devices, and (R3) the organizational approach of the incident command system (ICS) to investigate the relationship between ICS operation and DHH populations.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.