Field evaluation of a mobile location-based notification system for police officers

Abstract

To increase police officer awareness of incident locations, the Dutch police developed and implemented a location-based notification system (LBNS). This mobile service notifies police officers proactively to warrants, agreements and police focal points in their current vicinity. To assess the accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness and user experience of this service, a longitudinal field evaluation was conducted with thirty police officers over four months. The results show that using the LBNS, police officers were better informed of relevant information in their environment and this led to positive operational results. Users considered the interface clear and easy to use. However, users indicated that the system presented too many or non-relevant notifications and that the system is overly complex. Recommendations for further development of the LBNS are to mitigate unwanted interruption by intelligent filtering of notifications and integration of system components.

Understanding Mobile Notification Management in Collocated Groups

“…Furthermore, the notifications of new shared photos in the photo pool often told the groups something that they could already physically see for themselves, being collocated. Redundancy and overload with notifications in mobile collaborative systems has also been reported by Streefkerk et al (2008).…”

“…Application areas that may benefit from understanding and supporting notification management within groups include locally distributed work settings with high temporal demands, such as policing (Streefkerk et al, 2008), fire-fighting (Jiang et al, 2004), and disaster response. Moreover, technology support of leisure activities are relevant, such as cultural visiting (Brown et al, 2005;Bellotti et al, 2008), spectating at outdoor sports events (Jacucci et al, 2007;Salovaara et al, 2006), location-based games (Bell et al, 2006), and learning (Benford et al, 2005).…”

Exploiting Context in Location-Based Information Systems

“…In [5], a mobile service is presented that notifies police officers about warrants, agreements and police focal points in their vicinity. The results of a field evaluation showed that police officers were better informed about their environment, however, officers complained that the system offered too many, often irrelevant notifications.…”

Untitled

“…One challenge for the design of computational devices is precisely to overcome that problem, and let computing power and network technology create environments where information is externally available precisely at the locations and times when it is needed by a user who is operating in autopilot mode. Current developments in mobile and context-aware systems are investigating this problem (e.g., Steen, van Eijk, de Koning, & Reitsema, 2009;Streefkerk, van Esch-Bussemakers, & Neerincx, 2008).…”