Take Back the Night

To live in a safe and secure environment is one of the most basic needs of human beings. Independent of the actual situation, the subjective impression of being safe can be compromised by information about previous accidents in the media or social networks, by broken illumination, or simply because one is the only one walking through a dark alley. The impression of insecurity may hamper the personal freedom in a way that people don’t dare to go home alone from a club-night, don’t dare to stay after dark in an empty university environment or in the worst case don’t dare to leave home at all.

In this project, we created a prototypical app that increases the subjective impression of being safe in a dark by enabling the user to “look around the corner” displaying information about whether and where other people are present in the environment. For that aim, we integrate information from stationary environmental sensors with data from smart phone location sensors (GPS). The information is displayed on a map showing locations for registered users and tentative occupation numbers for areas with sensors. Based on this information, a user can make more informed decisions taking the safer route.

In September 2016, we finally managed to establish 6 sensors between Långhuset and Teknikhuset at ORUs main campus. Soon after, the app could also display these information. On Oct 18th, the app was officially launched via Google Play Store (see https://www.oru.se/nyheter/lanserar-app-som-ska-oka-kanslan-av-sakerhet/)

Take Back the Night is a project funded by Internetfonden (Aug 2015 – Nov 2016)