Disaster Assessment Surveyor System
Co-designing an app to easily collect and analyse data for disaster impacted areas
The challenge
An image of a large tree that has fallen on a residential house
Disasters present significant threats and challenges to both human communities and the environment.
The impact on life and property is considerable and will increase with the frequency and severity of these events.
Disaster surveys reveal how houses and the environment are impacted.
There are limitations to the surveying methods that currently exist. For example, during the 2019/20 Black Summer fires, fire agencies were unable to conduct comprehensive surveys for a significant proportion of the affected area due to a lack of resources and capability.
One way to resolve this resource and capability gap is through the development of a consistent national approach for post-disaster data collection that enables greater inter-agency collaboration and citizen participation.
Our response
Originally we created the Bushfire Surveyor System (BSS) application with users to enable emergency agencies, researchers and citizens to easily collect and analyse data for bushfire impacted areas.
In a good news story for co-development, funders, stakeholders and users prompted the team to enable multi-hazard assessments within the system. This was important for users working across multiple hazards, to ensure a streamlined experience.
In response we have changed the name of the App and widened its use to multi-hazards.
The new name will be the ‘Disaster Assessment Surveyor System or DASS’.
DASS is a flexible assessment system that supports all hazards, not just bushfires.
The platform helps government agencies, researchers, and citizens perform post-incident damage and impact assessments.
Our goal is for the system to be federally hosted so that agencies do not incur any ‘per device licenses’ costs.
User engagement and testing
An image of someone in the driver seat of a car, using the DASS app on a mobile phone
The team works collaboratively with representatives from state and territory government agencies (WA, SA, Victoria, NSW, ACT and Queensland) to develop DASS. This includes:
- six working group meetings
- six online user testing sessions
- in-field user testing with 21 users in South Australia
- in depth survey content reviews with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), South Australia, Tasmania Fire Service, Victorian Rapid Risk Assessment Team (RRAT) and others.
By understanding post-disaster impacts in more detail, we can better support policy, community education and preparedness.
We will be working with early adopters of the system to enable trial access and customise survey templates to their needs. Register your interest.
How does DASS work
A series of icons that show the progression of work using the DASS. Customise your survey, deploy on your devices, collect data, export and learn.
- High quality, secure and nationally consistent data.
- An intuitive, customisable and collaborative user experience.
- No enterprise licenses, making it more accessible to more people and agencies.
- DASS comprises 2 integrated tools:
- Mobile – A user-friendly app enabling rapid user onboarding and efficient data collection for both initial and detailed assessments with offline capabilities.
- Web – A browser-based system for managing users, teams, invites, templates, surveys, access permissions and data export. It includes 2 ready-made customisable templates for initial and detailed assessments.