A study of users’ acceptance and satisfaction of emergency call service
Résumé
In recent years, there has been rapid and significant development of road transport technologies in order to
reduce the number of killed and injured people on roads. These include safety technologies, emergency call
systems (eCall), and advanced traveler information systems. The eCall system is an automatic in-vehicle
emergency call service, which is mainly used for notifying emergency services about dangerous road situations
and their exact location. In this paper, an eCall platform prototype is developed to allow quick and
efficient rescue of injured people in dangerous road situations. The eCall function is developed and installed
in nomadic devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). Large-scale field operational tests were conducted in real
settings to assess the impacts of the eCall function provided by in-vehicle nomadic devices. More precisely,
experiments were conducted by more than 250 participants with different sociodemographic profiles in order
to study the users’ acceptance of the use of the developed eCall function for large-scale usage. The collected
data are analyzed, and results are reported. Performed experiments showed the usefulness,
acceptance, and satisfactory performance of the eCall service.