Abstract

Public policies are set to support natural hazards' prevention and management. In addition to risk management, those policies could raise public awareness of hazards. It is essential to note the complexity of decision-making processes at both individual and governmental levels. The authorities need to understand the citizen's potential critical decisions to adjust and adapt the mitigation plans. Tools and technologies (e.g., simulation video, serious game) could support risk management by capturing citizens' behaviors, analyzing their decision-making process, improving their learning and situational awareness, and enhancing their capacities to face disasters. The technologies should mind different users with specific behaviors, characteristics, and skills, needing personalized adaptation to overcome those dynamics.

This thesis first explores the effect of users' emotions in natural hazards preparedness using a simulation video of a hazard. More precisely, we performed a test of a conceptual model studying the role of emotional forecasts and related bias (i.e., impact bias) on people's preparedness in the context of natural risks.  

Second, having input from our emotional biases literature reviews and experiments, we understood the necessity of serious games as one of the communication channels that could enhance citizens' learning process, especially in the natural hazard context. Further, we understood that UI customization is based on creating a user model, which then allows adapting the interface to the user and its environment. Regarding the UI adaptation impact on preparedness and the prevention of natural hazards, we propose a generic problem space to cover various dimensions for user-interface adaptation. An architecture is proposed based on the problem space that can be used to design adaptive user interfaces (UI) to users' emotions and their temporal aspects. A prototype illustrates the architecture to show the approach's feasibility and interest. We chose to create an adaptive interface for a serious game, which enhances public risk perception and preparedness.