These are highly specialised pieces of technical equipment with a tiny potential market. The use case isn't fixed unattended public installations to be used by

These are highly specialised pieces of technical equipment with a tiny potential market. The use case isn't fixed unattended public installations to be used by untrained randoms, but ad-hoc use by trained users like cave rescue teams and speleologists. As for the UI, production (like much in the caving world) is semi-commercial at best; an iPhone it isn't and frankly it doesn't need to be.