By the end of the semester, students seeking an escort to their homes at night will be able to use a new smartphone app instead of waiting for Police Auxiliary to meet them.
University researchers Ashok Agrawala and Matthew Mah are working to create a virtual escort program to help students, faculty and staff travel safely to their destinations using their cell phone’s cameras. Mah said the pair came up with the idea after hearing several complaints that waiting for an officer to walk to a student’s location makes the existing service too inconvenient.
“Our understanding is that it takes a long time for the escorts to show up and the service is not widely used,” said Mah, an advanced computer studies research associate. “Our application will be able to provide you greater safety by streaming live video to get you from point A to point B and get you home quickly.”
The free app will access the camera on the user’s smartphone so the receiver can see and hear what the user experiences on his or her walk home, Mah said. He added they are developing the app in conjunction with the Office of Information Technology and University Police, although he has not yet secured funding for the virtual escort app.
“There is no dedicated funding for this at present,” he wrote in an email. “It is being developed on shoestrings.”
University Police spokesman Capt. Marc Limansky said the app is still in the “idea phase.”
“If people are hesitant to use our services because they have to wait for our officers to come get them, this may be a good option to use,” he said.
Junior psychology major Shana Jones said she is skeptical of the app, noting it would not provide the same security as a police officer.
“The walking escort is all about numbers, so someone could still come and kill you,” Jones said.
Agrawala and Mah, however, are confident they can create an effective app that will expand on the services of M-Urgency, a similar program they launched earlier this semester. That service connects users directly to 911 dispatchers via video in emergency situations if they are in University Police’s concurrent jurisdiction – which includes the campus and some surrounding areas.
M-Urgency, which is only available to Android users with a directory ID, has been downloaded about 100 times since its launch at the end of January, but no one has used it, Mah said. However, he’s optimistic the number of downloads and uses will increase after police release the iPhone version later this month.
“From our informal survey, it seems that more people have iPhones than Androids, but we’re really trying to get more people to download it,” Mah said.
While the M-Urgency app faced several setbacks in development that pushed its release date back from September to January, Agrawala said researchers have already worked through most potential technological problems, so they do not expect similar delays. Whether the app will change how many officers are available to escort students home will depend on how the community receives it, Limansky said.
“If it works very well, we may start to minimize the walking escorts we have, but we won’t get rid of officers on the street,” he said. “I think the advantage we’ll see is being able to handle more escorts in a more time-efficient manner.”
Junior biology major Salwa Saif said she felt the app would not help her if she were in a dangerous situation.
“There’s no reaction time with that app,” she said. “They would still have to come and get you if something happened.”
Others said the app seemed beneficial, and they would like researchers to expand the service to other areas, such as Washington.
“I would definitely use something like that, especially because I’ve called services like Nite Ride and it never came,” sophomore government and politics and psychology major Rachel Cavanaugh said.
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