Pilot development support
DoNotFear, a safety project with a participatory approach
DoNotFear is a safety application with a participatory approach developed by WiseTown in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Berlin and co-funded by EIT Digital. It aims precisely to overcome fear and anxiety on the public transport in Berlin.
Thanks to the interconnection, citizens, using their smartphones, through the dashboard “WiseTown”, are enabled to interact with each others or with the public transport company in order to provide security and be able to intervene in situations where other passengers perceives fear situations.
Solution
Using an application with an easy to use interface, the passengers are able to know how many people are in the vicinity and how many are available to offer help. If being in an uncomfortable situation, the passenger can try to connect up with the community, for example by asking other passengers to approach or alert the mobility manager by sending messages or issues.
Through the operational dashboard and modern FIWARE and Esri technology, the security staff are able to offer assistance, getting in touch with the passengers in difficulty. Besides, the application analyzes the perceptions of the passengers, visualizing data through graphics and statistical tools.
Improve travel experience
Event though, according to different recent studies, the European public transport is considered very safe, people often perceive stations or trams, subways, buses, as highly dangerous places and experience situations of insecurity and fear. This type condition mainly happens to vulnerable groups such women, elderly and people living with disabilities, plus passengers traveling along feel more insecure. It is also noted that passengers feel less secure at night or while waiting at subway stations. Besides noise, garbage, or negative reporting increase the feeling of discomfort in public transport.
Technology, light, art & design and presence of security personnel at stations increase subjective feeling of security.
About the application
“WiseTown, and especially its output the “Heatmaps”, is very valuable for smart city solutions since they show additional realities. For this reason maybe we can call them problems and challenges city planners and officials can address. In our case it helped us to outline the map of perceived insecurity. In order to shape the cities of the futures this information is extremely valuable. With this we can create comfortable and save spaces in the public environment for all.”
