From alerting to awareness

Wireless Emergency Alerting (WEA) is a standards-based transport and presentation service that provides a broadcast channel for communicating short text messages to subscribers in cellular systems. For emergency situations in which a single, short text message is sufficient to convey the situation, its importance and the intended action for recipients, WEA is efficient and effective. In more complex emergency situations that may require a stream of messages to convey changing situations, importance, and action, users are confronted with message sequences and must mentally digest them. Errors from out-of-order interpretation can lead to serious consequences. We present a novel approach for conveying information in such situations that re-uses much of the WEA investment in message transport but replaces the presentation with an automated digestion mechanism. We evaluate this new approach through a field experiment, showing that it measurably reduces errors of interpretation