An innovative mobile app integrating relevant and crowdsourced information for improving citizen's safety
Agustín García Pereira, Elsa Estévez, Pablo Rubén Fillottrani · 2018
Currently, urban centers are affected by insecurity to a lesser or a greater extent, being public safety a pending issue on the agenda of most governments. Unfortunately, in some communities, particularly in developing countries, robberies, murders, kidnappings, gender violence, among others, are common on a daily basis, and this trend does not seem to diminish. Nevertheless, the widespread use of mobile devices raises relevant opportunities in the prevention of security problems and the protection of public safety. This paper presents a mobile app that integrates data from various sources, such as the city open data portal, the 911 emergency service, crowdsourced information from citizens in nearby areas, and user's personal data. To assess its novelty, we discuss similar apps and related work, comparing functionalities and identifying some advantages of the proposed app. The paper also introduces technical details of the proposed solution. The main contribution of this work is the proposed mobile app that encourages citizens and government to work together aiming at improving public safety using data from various sources.