Development of a Mobile Application for Recording and Sharing Road Incidents Data Case Study: Nairobi County

Abstract

A road incident could be an accident, carjacking, speeding, hit-and-run and amongothers. The frequency of these road incidents ison the rise in Kenya todaywith many of these incidents going unnoticedandthe parties involved in these unreported cases often never beingheld accountable. Oneof thefactors that contribute to increased frequency of road incidentsis that roadusers lack a simple and proper medium which can be used to report such incidents and complains directlyto the authorities. Most witnesses would rather leave the incident to chance rather than goto the relevant authorities because they lack a convenient mechanism to report such kind of incidents. Aunified way of sharing road incidents data with different stakeholders including the general publicis also absent.Use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to manage road incidents has since gained prominence around the world over time. Web mapping can be used as a quicker way to report road incidents as well as improve sharing of road incidents data.In this studya road incidents recording and sharingsystem was developed.This system consists of a geodatabaseof road incidents for the study area.A mobile application was also created and is used to report road incidents which are stored in the geodatabase. Theseincidents aredisplayed on a web map where these details can be viewed by any interested party.The Internet makes these web maps more accessible because no special software needs to be installed on the user‟s computer. Additionallyauthorized people can update the action progress and also flag off incidents which are resolved.This is important in ensuring that allincidents are attended to. Locationinformation recording is supportedin this applicationand depends entirely on a smartphone‟sinbuilt Global Positioning (GPS)module and Google Places Application Programming Interface (API).The development of this system followed the waterfall System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and was supplemented by use of prototypes. Aqualitative framework was developed to access the suitability and applicability of this medium for reporting and sharing road incidents data. The testing wasconducted with a limited number of users in Nairobi area and was hugely successful with many agreeing that such a system would improve the reporting and response to road incidents. The users also found the application to be usable and easy to understand and can improve roadincident reporting and contributing to road safety improvement