Verification of the Effects of Personalized Evacuation Alerts using Behavioral or Location Information with the Sense of Urgency in a Disaster

Abstract

Delayed evacuation from a huge disaster is one of the factors that increase human damage. It has been pointed out the difficulty in urging an early evacuation after a disaster because people tend to underestimate information that is inconvenient for them, which is called normalcy bias. The most effective way to urge evacuation is to contact each of the evacuees directly, such as calling them. That is, we consider that we should provide information to evacuees that makes them feel as if it is being said to them directly.In this study, we focus on disaster alert services which send disaster information to personal mobile devices (i.e., smartphones) and consider textual expressions of alert that generate a sense of urgency for disaster. Since people always carry their smartphones with them, we expect that personal expression of alert will be possible using the information available on their own smartphones. As for information obtained from a device, in this study, we focus on the location information acquired from GPS and the behavioral information of the user acquired from the accelerometer. We assume that if an alert with textual expression that seems to identify the individual user by using these information is provided, the user receives it will feel as if it is being said to him/her directly. As for the degree of identification of individuals, three degrees of expression are set for location and behavioral information, respectively. Concretely, for location information, 1. the first indicates that a river has flooded, and 2. the second one gives the name of flooded river, and 3. the last shows the distance from the flooded river to user’s current location. For behavioral information, 1. the first includes no information about user’s behavior, 2. the second indicates that the user is reading the alert message, and 3. the last points out how the user is operating the smartphone (e.g., a smartphone is in user’s hand or on user’s desk). We set nine patterns of alert expression by combining the expression based on location and behavioral information.To verify the effectiveness of the alert expressions, we conducted a comparative verification experiment for them. In this experiment, we had the collaborators perform the specified daily task alone in a dark room hearing rain. While the collaborators were performing the task, the one evacuation alert of the nine patterns was sent to them. After receiving the alert, the collaborators confirmed it and then answered the questionnaire. Each of the collaborators repeated this process five times. In the questionnaire, we asked questions about how much they felt a sense of urgency, and how much they thought the alert was directed at them and so on. As a result of this verification, we found that textual expression using location information tend to be more effective as they feel that the message is being said to them. We will describe the detailed experimental results in the camera ready manuscript.

Keywords: Textual Expression, Personalization, Evacuation Alert, Disaster Prevention

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001701