DigDok (KIRAS)

For all prison staff, security and order are the action-guiding principles that are necessary to maintain prison operations. In particular, routine activities that take place in direct contact with prisoners require increased security measures, for the de facto and legal protection of all involved. They are therefore subject to precise, but so far still partially analog, documentation. This research project therefore analyzes the optimization potential of security-relevant routine activities in prisons and the possible use of relevant tools (wearables, smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, etc.).

After surveying the analog and digital process landscape, documentation processes are selected together with the stakeholders and optimization possibilities are determined through digitization and automation (e.g., a specific tool/technology is selected and made available for the use case). The goal is to integrate the existing systems of the prisons into the scenarios for digitization and to make them available on the move, e.g., through digitized mission diaries, situation reports, and instructions for action in emergencies or crisis situations. Based on the identified digitization potential, implementation scenarios are defined and subjected to a practical test of user acceptance to the extent of a technology spike involving offline-capable mobile devices.

These analyses lead to an application-oriented roadmap that describes the optimization possibilities of selected documentation processes and associated workflows for decision-makers in the penal system. Based on the specifics of prisons and the requirements of relevant stakeholders, a security-relevant part of the future of digitization in prisons will be designed, which, at the interface of organizational ethnographic and technical findings, will develop practical solutions for previously analog routine activities and classic operating patterns on stationary devices. The result is a presentation of which technologies (such as augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, etc.) or devices/tools (wearables, smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, etc.) are beneficial for selected processes in prisons.