A social location-based emergency service to eliminate the bystander effect

Abstract

The availability of inexpensive smartphones with GPS units and the ability to run 3rd party software facilitated the rapid emergence of a large number of location-based services (LBS). While LBSs are mostly developed for supporting travel and navigation related application scenarios, in this contribution we want to motivate the use of mobile devices for personal safety services. The problem of getting help in a crowd has been addressed by research in social psychology for more than 30 years. Obstacles in the social help process have been summarized in the concept of the bystander effect. This contribution aims to show how a LBS can overcome these obstacles by activating the social group of a victim. We discuss features of an emergency alert service that notifies nearby contacts of a victim of the incident and guides them to the victim so that they can provide help. Furthermore, we will discuss several ways to develop an emergency alert service as an industrial product which infers the social closeness of service participants from different sources of data. Also, we will discuss and compare approaches for the system design we considered while implementing a prototype. A feasibility assessment indicates that this service will actually provide benefits in practice. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.