Augmenting the officer:

I looked at common tasks and safety issues officers face when patrolling:

Immediate Officer Safety

Face Tracking(Machine Learning)
Hand Tracking(Machine Learning)
Emotional State(Machine Learning)
Distance(LiDAR)

Civilian Identification

Record(Database)
Civilian Name(Database)
Civilian Race(ML & Database)
Civilian Age(Database & ML)
Vehicle Identification(Inference)
Weapon Identification/Evidence(Inference)

Officer Tasks

Ticket assignment
Closest Address
Cross Streets(GPS)
Compass(GPS)
Coord(GPS)
Team Member Location(GPS)
Team Distance(GPS)
Type
Routing(GPS)

Department Documentation

Officer Location
Officer Name
Dept Name
Time Stamp

Then I did a bit of exploration on speculative design for such an assistant via Hollywood.

UI Research/Inspiration

Well cool stuff, but how would any of this work in real-time. Personally, I am overwhelmed with heavy UI in realtime gameplay. I can only imagine deciphering UI cues on a wearable during a high stress situation.

As I looked at all this information I thought some information gathering & logistics could be offloaded from the officer. So, as I move forward

I decided to approach in tiers of visual focus:

Tier 1(Safety) Information
Tier 2(Public Safety Tasks)
Tier 3(ancillary information, not safety or task critical)

A department would have non-patrol officers to assist patrol officers. They would be a secondary eyes and ears for the patrolling officers.

Initial version would be augmented by AI and a secondary officer at the department.

I began to think what wearables would look like and what the general components I would need to account for in such a design. There was also a social perception of a officer wearable.

Officer Wearable

Able to wear for ~4 Hours
Ability to run or make fast head movements while wearing
8 hour charge for a shift
Field of View
Microphone Placement
Tether should not be limiting Officer head articulation
Backpack would need to stay cool and be padded adequately for comfort

Social Perception

Approachable
Friendly
Non-authoritarian(should not look like riot suppression gear)

Set-Up

My initial thought for setting up the wearable as an officer would be ~5 minutes at a station within the department. Ideally, there would be a way to configure when not on premises.

Product Design Explorations

Patrol Assist | AI Augmentation of a Patrol Officer