OpenAlerts: A Software System to Evaluate Smart Emergency Alerts and Notifications

Alerts and notifications are increasingly being used in emergency situations. However, notifying users when an alert is not contextually useful results in those users opting out of this mode of alerting. There is a need to extensively evaluate such notifications and understand their utility before adopting them in real-world alert systems.

In this paper, we describe OpenAlerts, an open-source software that allows creating and evaluating the impact of simulated alerts and notifications. The proposed system is an extension to a testbed that was used by over two-hundred users across two university campuses to evaluate potential improvements to the US-based Wireless Emergency Alerts. The system allows A/B-type user testing of many potential enhancements including embedding maps, fine geo-targeting of alerts, embedding URLS, and speech-to-text.