Walksafe: College Campus Safety App Incorporating Pebble Smartwatch
Open Access
- Author:
- Vaghela, Saloni-dharmeshkumar
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Dr Patrick C Shih, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Emergent Design
Safety
Location-based
WalkSafe
Emergecny notification
Wearable technology - Abstract:
- I present a campus security app incorporating wearable technology like Pebble smartwatch. The app, WalkSafe, is a locationbased app that notifies users of emergencies around them. The app is compared to The Pennsylvania State University’s emergency notification system - PSUAlert, which provides timebased alerts. I identified weakness of the existing PSUAlert system and addressed them by introducing a location-based emergency notification system with the records of past incidents along with the type of emergency with respect to the user’s location. I used a multimethod approach to evaluate WalkSafe and used the PSUAlert system as a baseline. I assessed both the systems with 9 participants by notifying the participants of the fake emergencies and asking them to use both systems to understand details regarding the emergency and its location. The participants were asked to complete pre- and post-surveys that question ed them about the metrics for evaluating both the systems. Results from content analysis and paired Ttest indicated that metrics for evaluating both the system namely: user’s perceived convenience, perceived security, willingness to use and willingness to share were significantly higher when using WalkSafe. Participants were asked to provide recommendations that would further improve WalkSafe. Based on the recommendations of the participants, features like 911 calling, particular incident on/off button, location of nearest emergency poles phones in the vicinity of the user, etc. were incorporated. The mockups and screenshots of such features have also been presented.