Smombie Forecaster: Alerting Smartphone Users About Potential Hazards in Their Surroundings

With recent advancements in communication and smartphone technology, many convenient services, such as SNS, gaming, video streaming, and news, are now available to users. However, this wealth of options is disadvantageous in that it makes smartphone users smombies (i.e., users who focus on their smartphones and ignore their surroundings), which poses a safety hazard. For improving the safety of pedestrian smartphone users, attempts have been made to install traffic lights on sidewalks or warn users of approaching vehicles through mobile apps. However, the effectiveness of these smombie warning systems has not been investigated yet. In this article, we propose Smombie Forecaster, which uses inertial smartphone sensors and the BLE beacon, to detect the three most prevalent smombie settings (walkways, stairs, and crosswalks), provide relevant alerts to users, and log their compliance with these alerts. We conducted a field test with 24 participants under these three settings. The results verified the effectiveness of the proposed system; the smartphone pause time increased by 1.59 times, and the average frequency of steps taken by users decreased from 1.68 Hz to 1.47 Hz. A post-experiment survey, interviews conducted with participants of the experiment, and users' smartphone logs provide important design implications for the proposed smombie alerting system.