A cop’s smartphone

The smartphone on a field test - Photo: Jan Wilem Streefkerk

Can a smartphone application provide police officers with information that helps them operate more efficiently? Psychologist Jan Willem Streefkerk developed and tested a prototype.

A four-month long field test involving 30 police officers in Groningen (2007) revealed that location alone was not a relevant basis for sifting information from the police database. When for example a police officer was in the vicinity of a local prison, the officer was overwhelmed by dozens of messages saying that people who hadn’t paid their fines were living in this area. Six officers quit the test programme because they felt the information they received wasn’t worth the trouble of consulting the device.

“The information you send to police officers in the street should be context-aware,” says Jan Willem Streefkerk, a psychologist at TNO and a PhD student of Professor Mark Neerincx at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science’s man-machine interaction group. ‘Context’ implies the system takes into account information about the receiver’s location, the task he or she is engaged in, and the priority level of the message.

During his PhD research, Streefkerk developed a system that would use dynamic information from the emergency command centre. Depending on the priority, messages can be sent silently or with an intrusive beep tone. The system also checks what tasks the officers are engaged in and adapts the message’s priority level accordingly. A police officer on his way to an armed robbery for example will not be distracted by a missing-persons notification. Instead, the system simply sends a one-word summary. In a simulated experiment, Streefkerk found that contextual messaging improved both the officers’ awareness and their decision-making, although it did not reduce their reaction times.
Similar results were found for a smartphone-based team advice tool. This tool knows and displays the team members’ locations, while also selecting and calling a fellow officer when an officer on patrol requires assistance. Assisted team formations were improved (incidents were better divided among the team), but not quicker. “In a real emergency a radio broadcast is still the best option,” Streefkerk admits.
Since there is little budget available for further developing the system for policing purposes, Streefkerk plans to adapt the system for fire brigades and the military.

J.W. Streefkerk, ‘Doing the right task: Context-Aware Notification for Mobile Police Teams’, 20 May 2011, PhD supervisor Professor Mark A. Neerincx.