Abstract
Smart phone zombie or Smombie means pedestrians who walk without attention to their surroundings because they are focused upon their smart phone. Because the traffic accidents and injuries caused by Smombie have been increased rapidly in recent years, the social attention and policies are needed to prevent it. This study was conducted to analyze Smombie's current status and some solutions used before and to propose new improved method through the latest ICT trend. In this study, we did the field survey to check Smombies at several places in Seoul through people counting, and found that a lot of pedestrians still use the smart phone while walking. And we analyzed many case studies about some solutions to prevent Smombies previously. The case studies include legal regulations, government policies, smart phone app services and facilities that are used before. We studied them through internet searches and reference studies and we also checked the current operating situation as visiting several places that the solutions actually has been operated. Therefore, we found there are some limitations in previous solutions in terms of effectiveness and management. To consider new solution that can be expected to overcome the limitations, we analyzed the latest ICT trends focused on features to utilize the Smombie prevention, especially video recognition and digital signage. In these days, video recognition has been developed rapidly with assistance of AI technology and it can recognize the specific pedestrian's characteristics such as holding smart phone as well as hair style, clothes, backpack and etc. On the other hands, the digital signage is the convergence device that includes big display, network connection and various IoT sensors. It can be used as public media in many places for public services as well as advertising. Through these analysis results, we show the requirements and the user scenario for the improved method to prevent Smombie. Finally, we propose to develop R&D technology to recognize Smombie exactly as pedestrian attributes and to spread creative contents to increase pedestrian's interest and engagement for Smombie prevention through digital signage.
