Chatbot Based Public Sensoring to improve Situational Awareness

In disaster management, any relevant information about the situation can help decision makers to take the right decisions and initiate appropriate response measures. The digitalization of society offers more and more opportunities to gather information from the public. As instant messengers are one of the most widely used communication applications, they offer a broad user base for the collection of situational information. To minimize the effort involved, chatbots offer a promising option for the automated acquisition of specific information via instant messengers. In this paper we present an information system under development for the collection and reproduction of image information for disaster management. We also present the results of a first UTAUT-based evaluation of the current state of development to get an impression of the usability and perceived usefulness of the approach.