Enhancing Pedestrian Safety with Directional On-Smartphone Warnings

Copyright held by the owner/author(s). MobileHCI 2017, September 4, 2017, Vienna, Austria ACM xxx. http://dx.doi.org/xxx Abstract “Smartphone Zombies” (or smombies, Langenscheidt‘s youth word of the year 2015) are suffering from bad situation awareness, therefore representing a safety risk for themselves and other road users. We propose to use visual, directional warnings directly on users’ Smartphones and implemented a prototype to assess its potential. A pilot study (N=5) executed in the field using a “Wizard-of-Oz” approach revealed, that trust in the system is one of the main challenges to cope with. This position paper serves as the foundation to discuss involved issues as well as how other related aspects (feedback design, etc.) influence effectivity and usability of such a system.