skip to main content
10.1145/3290607.3312781acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
abstract

Personal Safety App Effectiveness

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We present the results of our study of people's responses to unsafe scenarios with personal safety apps. Several such apps have been developed, offering features such as a location-sharing panic button. However, there is little research into how people might respond in different personal safety situations, and how such apps might contribute to their response. We performed a lab study with 30 participants and used semi-structured interviews to gather responses to a set of three increasingly risky scenarios, both before and after the installation of a personal safety app. From our results, participants stated that they would use mobile phones and personal safety apps most often to support "collective" responses, with calls to others for assistance. Further, while collective responses were often combined with "avoidance" or "protective" responses, when using a personal safety app, collective responses were less often combined with other reaction types. Overall, our results suggest some potential benefit from personal safety apps, though more study is required.

References

[1]
S Ananda Kanagaraj, G Arjun, and A Shahina. 2013. Cheeka: A mobile application for personal safety. In CollaborateCom. IEEE, 289--294.
[2]
bSafe. 2017. Never Walk Alone Personal Safety App. http://getbsafe.com/.
[3]
D Chand, S Nayak, K Bhat, S Parikh, Y Singh, and A Kamath. 2015. A mobile application for Women's Safety: WoSApp. In TENCON. IEEE, 1--5.
[4]
J-C Chang, P Wang, K-H Fan, S-R Yang, D-Y Su, M-Sh Lin, M-T Sun, and Y-C Tseng. 2011. iMace: protecting females from sexual and violent offenders in a community via smartphones. In ICPPW. IEEE, 71--74.
[5]
CircleOf6. 2017. Personal Safety App. https://www.circleof6app.com/.
[6]
K Cumiskey and K Brewster. 2012. Mobile phones or pepper spray? Imagined mobile intimacy as a weapon of self-defense for women. Feminist Media Studies 12, 4 (2012), 590--599.
[7]
Lauren B Gates and William M Rohe. 1987. Fear and reactions to crime: A revised model. Urban Affairs Quarterly 22, 3 (1987), 425--453.
[8]
W Huizhong. 2016. India says every phone must have a panic button by 2017. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/27/technology/india-smartphone-panic-button-rape/index.html.
[9]
N Karusala and N Kumar. 2017. Women's Safety in Public Spaces: Examining the Efficacy of Panic Buttons in New Delhi. In CHI. ACM, 3340--3351.
[10]
S KishorBabu, V Sagar, B Nikhitha, and P Priyanka. 2015. Exigency alert and tracking system. In ICACEA. IEEE, 700--705.
[11]
Life360. 2017. "The New Family Circle" Communication App. https://www.life360.com/.
[12]
O McCarthy, B Caulfield, and M O'Mahony. 2016. How transport users perceive personal safety apps. Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behaviour 43 (2016), 166--182.
[13]
J Nasar, P Hecht, and R Wener. 2007. 'Call if you have trouble': Mobile phones and safety among college students. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, 4 (2007), 863--873.
[14]
M Ovelgonne, A Sonnenbichler, and A Geyer-Schulz. 2010. Social emergency alert service-a location-based privacy-aware personal safety service. In NGMAST. IEEE, 84--89.
[15]
M Phillips, F Mostofian, R Jetly, N Puthukudy, K Madden, and M Bhandari. 2015. Media coverage of violence against women in India: a systematic study of a high profile rape case. BMC women's health 15, 1 (2015), 3.
[16]
ReactMobile. 2017. Enterprise Safety Platform. https://reactmobile.com/.
[17]
G Thakur, M Sharma, and A Helmy. 2010. Shield: Social sensing and help in emergency using mobile devices. In GLOBECOM 2010. IEEE, 1--5.
[18]
G Toney, F Jabeen, and S Puneeth. 2015. Design and implementation of safety armband for women and children using ARM7. In ICPACE. IEEE, 300--303.
[19]
Whitehouse. 2011. Apps Against Abuse. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/1is2many/apps-against-abuse.
[20]
XPrize. 2017. Anu & Naveen Jain Women's Safety XPrize. http://safety.xprize.org/.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Exploring the potential for Smart City technology for Women's SafetyProceedings of the 26th International Academic Mindtrek Conference10.1145/3616961.3616988(245-256)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Foregrounding Women's Safety in Mobile Social Matching and Dating AppsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35675597:GROUP(1-25)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Understanding the Role of Technology-mediated Solutions for Women’s Safety in Urban IndiaProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534843(638-642)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '19: Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2019
3673 pages
ISBN:9781450359719
DOI:10.1145/3290607
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2019

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. app effectiveness
  2. crime
  3. personal safety app
  4. unsafe situation

Qualifiers

  • Abstract

Funding Sources

  • NSERC

Conference

CHI '19
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 26 - May 1, 2025
Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)31
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Exploring the potential for Smart City technology for Women's SafetyProceedings of the 26th International Academic Mindtrek Conference10.1145/3616961.3616988(245-256)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Foregrounding Women's Safety in Mobile Social Matching and Dating AppsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35675597:GROUP(1-25)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Understanding the Role of Technology-mediated Solutions for Women’s Safety in Urban IndiaProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534843(638-642)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
  • (2021)Primary Crime Prevention Apps: A Typology and Scoping ReviewTrauma, Violence, & Abuse10.1177/152483802098556023:4(1093-1110)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2021
  • (2021)Exploring A Reporting Tool to Empower Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities to Self-Report AbuseProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445150(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media