Response Utilities – Create Incident

Many response teams work in remote locations where mobile networks are not available, or are available sporadically. Being able to create an incident offline (a placeholder, if not full details) allows capturing incident attendance.

Response Utilities version 1.0.8 has an option to create an incident, attach members (even offline) and queue that incident until on network and the information can be uploaded to D4H.

This ability is available for beta testing. Please check it out and provide feedback.

Note: This ability is (of course) dependent upon the user having the required permissions for their account in D4H.

New option to press “+” to create an incident.

Add title, reference identifier, a short description and attach attendance (from list of membership, available offline.)

D4H API

The D4H API (Application Programmer Interface) is a powerful way to access and interoperate with your organization’s D4H data, and enhance your organization’s D4H usage of it with your own developments.

For example you can create your own mobile application for D4H (in additional to the D4H mobile applications, that use the API.) That, or you can craft your own simple scripts, e.g. to provide a custom quiz to your users via the whiteboard.

The simplest way to get started is:

Review the D4H API document to see it does what you need.
Check out the Quick Start Guide.
Generate an API token.
Use the simple “Authorization: Bearer {API token}” approach (which is secure because the API use HTTPS to encrypt the traffic.)

A more flexible (but marked as experimental, and quite likely soon changing) approach is to implement a user “login”, to gather a token on demand. Note: This isn’t quite as simple as it first appears, it is two step not one. ( When we log in to D4H first with an account it is second our membership in an organization/team that we then use for most API calls, and some accounts are members of multiple teams. ) The authentication API grants an account token, and to call the main APIs one needs to use the account token to acquire a membership token from that account token. (The generated token above – from the team website – is already a membership token.)

Once you have a working token you can access most of the team data; and update some.

Activities (past and future)
Duty records
Member records
Groups
Equipment (and more)
Tasks
… and more

What do you want your D4H data to do?

You might want to create a simple an app or webpage to allow your membership to submit maintenance reports your way, or you might want to display call statistics or some recent incident information (or available tasks) on a display in your building. The D4H API allows you to decide what is important to you, and enhance D4H towards that goal. (I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Let me know.)

Powerful, but still ‘Work In Progress’, I hope…

Much as the D4H API is very powerful, the API is incomplete in a few key areas: incident updating, qualifications, tags, custom fields, and more.

Hopefully those will be coming because without them activities can be created, but not updated in any way (not adding a location, a tag, a description, nothing.) This limits any field-based tools for incidents.

No access to qualifications means we cannot create our own qualification reminder systems, and qualifications (we have many tens for every member) are a key challenge for our membership.

Response Utilities Android version 1.0.16

A new release of Response Utilities for D4H on Android is on Google Play. Version 1.0.16.

It contains improvements for Upcoming where attendance is displayed inline with the activity, and can be used to filter from the user’s perspective: all activities, Mine (ones the user is attending or requested to attend), Attending or Requested. Use this to more easily track down the upcoming activity you are looking for.

Improvements in Recent Activities include filtering by activity type: all activities, just incidents, just exercises or just events. Use this to more easily track down the recent activity you are looking for.

Check out this version of Response Utilities for D4H on Android.

D4H login

Mobile browsers do not do a great job of remembering your D4H member login credentials. Getting into D4H readiness and response when on the go (in the field) can be tricky, especially if you have secure account credentials. Response Utilities for D4H remembers your login credentials for you, and allows access to much of your D4H data (incidents, exercises, members, groups, and more) with ease.

As a native mobile application, Response Utilities for D4H has two significant advantages over a mobile browser. First, Response Utilities for D4H has control of local persistent storage (storing the D4H ‘login’ access token, and your team / member details.) Second, Response Utilities is fully responsive to the size of your device, presenting information natively to fit the screen, no scrolling / panning / zooming required.

See more about the information that Response Utilities allows access to.

Starting with release 1.0.4 (in beta testing) Response Utilities additionally easies mobile navigation to D4H features on the website. When you do need to access the D4H website in a mobile browser, Response Utilities will attempt to jump you to your goal, saving you navigating from the dashboard. It cannot perform the login in this case, but it will save you some frustration by removing navigation steps.

Apart from the list below, Response Utilities will also navigate you to an individual member’s profile, and qualification card, and an individual incident’s or exercise’s detail page.

Response Utilities for D4H on iOS. Version 1.0.3 released…

A release of Response Utilities 1.0.3. is rolling out. It releases a number of large and small improvements, and a few additions.

What’s New:
– Improved interface for upcoming and recent activities, and improved workflow for marking attendance. Activities are color coded to match the D4H activity colors. Color coding allows for and easier visual scan.

– “Off Duty” interface now includes an options for “Team” as well as for this “Member”, so overhead can more easily view team status (and team members can set their availability) when on the go.

– Integration into iOS Spotlight Search. In the iOS search bar you can find for members by name (or reference, or position) to quickly launch the application and provide a view of that member. Think of this as integrating D4H data into the phone or device’s contacts.

– “Whiteboard” support allows you to view (and add to) entries on the whiteboard. Share messages with others in the agency, from the field. (Perhaps implement a quiz on your whiteboard.)

– Activities can now be shared with other responders via a link into D4H. Allowing communication around an incident or exercise, as needed, without taking data out of D4H.

– More details have been added to the member view. Viewing a member now shows:

The member’s upcoming “off duty” status, if any set.
The member’s recent activities; incidents, exercises, events.
The member’s groups.
Now: Links to their profile on D4H and qualification card on D4H.

This extended member view allows a member to check themselves quickly, but also allows overhead and/or administration to check on a member.

– This release adds a number of links into D4H website, to ease navigation on the mobile website.

Learn more about Response Utilities for D4H.

D4H Whiteboard

The D4H whiteboard is a great way to get information out to the members of your organization. Some might not check email, and maybe you don’t wish to “spam” by sending to all, but adding a whiteboard message gets to people who log in to D4H on a regular basis. (We used it recently to remind about our annual SCBA mask fit testing.)

Adding a message (marked important or not) is a great way to get to the top of the D4H dashboard:

When we don’t have more pressing postings to make, we’ve chosen to offer quiz questions on our whiteboard as a fun way to keep content fresh in mind, and keep our membership engaged. We (with we being Coal Creek Canyon Fire Rescue) provide response for structure fire, wildland fire, rescue (including automobile), medical (as a BLS agency), hazardous materials, and (as we learned in 2013) other incidents, such as floods. We also assist with search and rescue (having mountainous state parks in our district.) We have a lot to remember, and quizzes are a good way to keep things top of mind.

We used a spreadsheet to gather questions and a simple ruby script (run automatically daily against the D4H APIs) to post the questions and answers. The script takes the day of the year and combines that with the number of quiz questions to pick today’s quiz question and yesterday’s answer, and posts both.

 #
 #  A snippet of the script, to add a whiteboard entry...
 #
 wuri = URI('https://api.d4h.org/v2/team/whiteboard')
 areq = Net::HTTP::Post.new(wuri)
 areq['Authorization'] = 'Bearer ___________'
 
 areq.set_form_data({'text' => formatted_question, 'enddate' => question_days_ahead_formatted}, '&')
        
 ares = Net::HTTP.start(wuri.hostname, 
                   wuri.port, 
                   :use_ssl => true) {|http|
   http.request(areq)
 }

You can view the Whiteboard in D4H’s MyD4H mobile application. Additionally, here is how the Whiteboard looks in Response Utilities for D4H…

Working with D4H groups

Some response teams use mailing lists to communicate with their members, and some create mailing lists per “group” (e.g. officers, leadership, etc.) within their organization, including for qualification groups; divers, drone pilots, EMTs, etc. etc.

Using groups within D4H allows you to reference members by name (their profile) and only have to manage the email address once within D4H, not once per mailing list. You can view members in a group and/or the groups a member is within. As things change (and things continually change; members retire, members get qualified and/or promoted) you can easily maintain D4H groups accordingly.

In D4H you can create as few or as many groups as you like, naming them as suits your purpose. You can create a Dive Team group, an Officers group, a per Station group, as required. You can set requirements on groups (ensuring you have a given number of such members on duty) and you can collaborate with groups. D4H allows you to message a group, sending to only those within that group.

Using groups make D4H more valuable for your organization.

Response Utilities, our mobile application for D4H allows you to quickly/easily view members within groups, and also send email and/or messages (if all members of the group have a mobile phone number registered with D4H) to all members of a group from anywhere you need. (See communications for how.)

Reviewing activities…

Response Utilities allows access to your agency’s incident and exercise information. Look at past incidents and their details, look at past training exercises (or events) and view attendance.

Were you active on the incident but your participation failed to get recorded? Did the report writer mishear details over the radio and hence misreport apparatus or important details of the response? Did you not get JPR (job performance review) credit from an exercise?

The more personnel that review past incidents – and soon after they occur – the more accurate the reports will be. That helps you, and the whole organization.

Use Response Utilities to check the time of the incident or exercise, as well as the duration. Check participation, including a quick scan of participants faces. (The current user is shown first, otherwise those with identified roles – e.g. command or instructor – come first.) check if the activity is still draft (shown as blank below) or has been published.

Communications

Response teams need to communicate to be effective as a coordinated team. Teams are usually well served during an incident with dispatch alerts to pagers / minitors, radio traffic for operational communications, and face to face AARs (after action reviews) to review the incident. Outside the incident, however, teams do less well at group communications.

Teams often use email mailing lists of manually managed text groups to communicate which work, but require additional maintenance effort to keep up to date. D4H facilitates communications with D4H collaborations within the system, and the ability to communicate to a group outside the system. These work well when one is at a computer.

Response Utilities for D4H leverages the up to date information in the D4H database to put similar capabilities in your pocket. Use Response Utilities to message individuals, message groups and/or any combination of the two.

Don’t limit your communications because you are broadcasting to too wide a group and don’t want to spam everybody. Communicate from your mobile device (using email or messaging) by sending to just the people who need to be included. Send to the new group of trainees, and copy the training officer. Send to the officers. Send to individuals. Communicate easily and precisely.

Response Utilities for D4H (iOS)

I am a volunteer firefighter in the mountains of Colorado, USA. We use D4H – Readiness & Response for managing many aspects of the department. We record incidents, exercises, events and attendance in D4H. We manage our inventory (for multiple stations, apparatus and personnel) and we maintain individual certifications / qualifications, and more, in D4H. Our members use D4H a lot.

D4H is a very powerful system with a lot of features, and its website is somewhat overwhelming on any mobile device, especially a mobile phone. Our membership needed something less powerful, an application for the tasks they perform on the go; viewing activities, setting attendance, communicating with other members, and updating off duty.

I created Response Utilities to allow our membership to interact with D4H. Response Utilities is a simple interface targeted at individual members, allowing them to view upcoming activities (and set their attendance), review past activities (incidents and more), and communicate with other members of the agency. Members who default to “on duty” (e.g. volunteers) are also able to easily set their “off duty” times.

Find out more here:

https://www.neukadye.com/mobile-applications/response-utilities/