Researchers from University of Alabama Birmingham Provide Details of New Studies and Findings in the Area of Risk Management (Reducing Distracted Pedestrian Behavior Using Bluetooth Beacon Technology: a Crossover Trial): Risk Management

2021 SEP 27 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Investigators publish new report on Risk Management. According to news originating from Birmingham, Alabama, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “The number of fatal pedestrian injuries in the United States has steadily increased over the past decade. Multiple factors likely contribute to this trend, but the growth of pedestrians distracted by mobile devices is widely hypothesized to play a major role.”

Financial supporters for this research include Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation (NSF), City of Birmingham Department of Transportation, UAB Department of Facilities, UAB Police and Public Safety Department, UAB Youth Safety Lab team.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the University of Alabama Birmingham, “Existing strategies to reduce distracted pedestrian behavior are few and mostly ineffective. The present study evaluated StreetBit, a mostly-passive primary prevention program to reduce distracted pedestrian behavior by alerting distracted pedestrians directly on their smartphone when they approach an intersection, reminding them to attend to traffic as they crossed. 385 individuals who regularly crossed a target street corner at an urban university downloaded StreetBit on their phones and participated in a crossover design study whereby the app was inactive for 3 weeks (baseline behavior phase), actively provided alerts for 3 weeks (intervention phase), and then was inactive again for 4 weeks (post-intervention phase). User distraction while crossing the intersection was collected electronically for a total of 34,923 street-crossing events throughout the 10-week study. In crude (unadjusted) models, participant distraction was similar across all phases of the research; this result was maintained after adjusting for potential covariates as well as after conducting a sensitivity analysis limited to data from only week 3 of each study intervention phase. In a model stratified by phone/warning type and baseline distraction rates, Android phone users who received a warning that blocked the full screen and had a high baseline distraction rate (>= 75% distracted crossings) had a 64% decreased odds of distraction during the alert phase (OR 0.36, 95% CI 0.25-0.51) and a 52% decreased odds of distraction during the post-intervention phase (OR 0.48, 95% CI 0.25-0.94). Users reported positive impressions about the StreetBit app in a post intervention survey. StreetBit, an innovative app designed to prevent distracted pedestrian behavior through a mostly passive primary prevention strategy relying on intrusive reminders, proved effective among smartphone users who received a warning blocking the full screen and who were frequently distracted at baseline, but not among other users. The results appear to reflect the confluence of two influencing factors. First, due to software development limitations, visually-distracted Android users received a highly intrusive app warning that blocked their smartphone screen whereas iOS users received a less intrusive banner notification blocking a small upper portion of the screen. Second, most users were curious to see if the app was functioning properly, creating artificially-inflated estimates of distraction as users purposefully watched their phones when crossing.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Thus, our results indicate promise for StreetBit as an effective intervention and warrant continued software development and empirical testing.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Reducing Distracted Pedestrian Behavior Using Bluetooth Beacon Technology: a Crossover Trial. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 2021;159. Accident Analysis & Prevention can be contacted at: Pergamon-elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, England. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; Accident Analysis & Prevention - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/accident-analysis-and-prevention/)

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from David C. Schwebel, University of Alabama Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, United States. Additional authors for this research include Ragib Hasan, Russell Griffin, Raiful Hasan, Mohammad Aminul Hoque, Md Yasser Karim, Kevin Luo and Anna Johnston.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2021.106253. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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