First responders play a crucial and integral role in today’s civil society. Among the plethora of services, they
provide, one may find law enforcement, firefighting and emergency medical services (EMS). In all three of the
aforementioned services, time management could play an important role in order to assist first responders to
reach their maximum potential and effectively and efficiently deal with the crisis. For instance, crime rates
could significantly decrease if a police officer has the complete situational awareness picture to hinder
criminals; fire fighters could be able to save more lives in less time from burning buildings and EMS could act
in a proper and quick manner in order to treat medical conditions (such as cardiac arrests) that could result in
death. The same applies to larger-scale crises that need even more effort on the proper coordination and
communication among multiple interdisciplinary teams. As a result, their everyday activities involve a large
number of stressful situations. These situations could be better handled with a set of soft skills such as
decision making, teamwork or stress resilience are of great importance in dealing with such situations. Digital
advancements like satellite image analysis can tremendously contribute to First Responders’ daily activities.
Therefore, they have to be under continuous training in order to be able to make use of these new tools.
STRONG steps in to propose a series of online courses that will fill in this gap and provide First Responders
with the training they need. These courses will be grouped by theme and not by the type of First Responder in
order to achieve a more transversal solution, as the challenges they face are not usually restricted to one
territory or to one specific field of activity.
The main aim of this research document is to document the state of the art of VR and gamification applied to
first responders training in Europe; best practices in use and effective methodologies to be applied in the
development of the training modules. This research document It includes the results from a survey made to
first responders of the participating countries to find out their training needs and their interest in the
proposed topics for the online courses to be developed.