Understanding "Death by GPS"

Abstract

Catastrophic incidents associated with GPS devices and other personal navigation technologies are sufficiently common that these incidents have been given a colloquial nickname: "Death by GPS". While there is a significant body of work on the use of personal navigation technologies in everyday scenarios, no research has examined these technologies' roles in catastrophic incidents. In this paper, we seek to address this gap in the literature. Borrowing techniques from public health research and communication studies, we construct a corpus of 158 detailed news reports of unique catastrophic incidents associated with personal navigation technologies. We then identify key themes in these incidents and the roles that navigation technologies played in them, e.g. missing road characteristics data contributed to over 24% of these incidents. With the goal of reducing casualties associated with personal navigation technologies, we outline implications for design and research that emerge from our results, e.g. advancing "space usage rule" mapping, incorporating weather information in routing, and improving visual and audio instructions in complex situations.

How does navigation system behavior influence human behavior?

“…Despite the popularity of navigation systems, concerns have been raised in the literature about the negative effects on spatial knowledge acquisition caused by their extensive use (e.g., Gardony, Brunyé, Mahoney, & Taylor, 2013; Klippel, Hirtle, & Davies, 2010; Montello, 2005). These systems consume most of a pedestrian’s attention, leading to decreased spatial knowledge (Parush, Ahuvia, & Erev, 2007) and even to fatal accidents (Lin, Kuehl, Schöning, & Hecht, 2017) due to divided attention between the survey perspective offered by the navigation system and the route perspective, i.e., the first-person view (Gardony et al, 2013). As the trend towards using navigation systems increases, a considerable amount of literature has recently examined how navigation systems negatively affect spatial knowledge acquisition and human navigation behavior.…”

Shared control versus traded control in driving: a debate around automation pitfalls

“…Oppositely, errors of omission occur when the human operator did not take appropriate action because the decision aid failed to provide advice (Skitka et al 1999). Lin et al (2017) reviewed 158 errors of omission and commission associated with the use of GPS devices while driving, 28% of which involved a fatality.…”

Landmark-Based Navigation Instructions Improve Incidental Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Real-World Environments

“…However, even when the system works properly, the risk of getting lost remains based on inadequate application of or over-reliance on the navigation assistance system. This was revealed in in a corpus of 158 so called "Death by GPS" incidents published in the English news between 2010 and 2017 (Lin et al, 2017) .…”

“…One finding showed that the use of automated assistance systems was associated with divided attention between the movement related task and the assisted navigation (Fenech et al, 2010;Gardony et al, 2013;Gardony et al, 2015). This resource allocation conflict increases the reliance on the navigation assistant in order to reduce attentional demands (Baus et al, 2001;Klippel et al, 2010;Parush et al, 2007) leading to an automation bias (Lin et al, 2017). The users tend to hand over the decision-making to the automated system (Bakdash et al, 2008;Fenech et al, 2010;Parush et al, 2007).…”