To optimally distribute tasks within police teams during mobile surveillance, a context-aware task allocation system is designed and evaluated with end-users. This system selects and notifies appropriate team members of current incidents, based on context information (officer availability, officer proximity to the incident and incident priority) and decision rules. Eight teams of three experienced police officers evaluated this system in a surveillance task through a virtual environment, comparing it to a non-adaptive system. Task performance, communication, workload and preferences were measured. Results show that team communication, decision making and response times improve using the adaptive system and that this system is preferred. We conclude that contextaware task allocation helps police teams to coordinate incidents efficiently.

To minimize unwanted interruption and information overload during surveillance, mobile police officers need to be supported by a mobile, contextaware notification system. This system adapts message presentation to message priority and context of use. A prototype is designed and evaluated in a simulated surveillance task, requiring users to attend to videos while handling messages on a mobile device. Adaptive notification led to better performance and less intrusive messages than non-adaptive notification, especially in high workload situations. Subjective judgments showed a positive user experience with the adaptive notification system. These empirical findings are used to improve the design of mobile notification support systems for police officers.

Team awareness is important when asking team members for assistance, for example in the police domain. This paper investigates how presentation modality (visual or auditory) of relevant team information and communication influences team awareness and choice accuracy in a collaborative team task. An experimental prototype was created and implemented, which provided a visual overview of location, availability, means of transportation and expertise of team members as well as ongoing team communication. In a simulated police task in a virtual environment, this prototype was compared to current auditory support, common in police practice. Results show that a visual overview of team information improves choice accuracy, while auditory information presentation improves team awareness. In designing support systems for the professional domain, this trade-off should be carefully considered.

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Motivation -Automated task allocation systems are prone to errors (e.g. incorrect advice) due to context events. Empirical assessment is needed of how the costs of incorrect task allocation advice relate to the benefits.