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Enhancing information interaction as a means for situation awareness maintenance in mobile field work

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Abstract

Maintenance of situation awareness is of critical importance for the safe and productive execution of mobile field work. However, there is scarcity of research considering maintenance of situation awareness in mobile field work settings. The case study analyses information interaction as a means to maintain situation awareness. The empirical data for the study were collected from security service personnel participating in a pilot of guarding service based on NFC (near field communication) technology. NFC enables ubiquitous and location- and context-aware computing. Interviews, on-site observation and a questionnaire were conducted to define situation awareness requirements and to assess both current user experiences and future scenarios of NFC-based information support for security service work. Results of the study show that information interaction challenges were related to non-value-adding information activities when trying maintain situation awareness. Challenges were related to disturbances in information flow between clients, security service back office and field. It was found that maintaining situation awareness in circuit guarding was more challenging than in local guarding. Future NFC functionalities providing information support in particular for maintenance of short-term situation awareness were assessed as promising.

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  1. School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, 33014, Tampere, Finland

    Heljä Franssila

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  1. Heljä Franssila
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Correspondence to Heljä Franssila.

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Franssila, H. Enhancing information interaction as a means for situation awareness maintenance in mobile field work. Cogn Tech Work 18, 567–582 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-016-0370-6

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