Computer-Based Support for Comprehensive Personal Risk Management

Security is a basic need of human beings. However, people in our society often do not attempt to achieve total security but are content with appropriate protection from major risks. The development of society towards the end of the twentieth century has increasingly made this task the responsibility of the individual who can no longer rely on the social net formerly provided by big families. On the one hand, the development of technology, which has introduced new and hardly assessable risks, undermines people's sense of personal safety, on the other hand, it offers new means to improve risk management. It is the objective of this dissertation to show how individuals may identify, assess, and manage their risks in a systematic manner by means of a computer-based tool.