Beyond the communications gap

Social media, the Internet of Things and big data gain traction within citizen-minded emergency services agencies.

In a country where natural disasters are frequent and distance makes communication an ongoing challenge, new technologies have been a mixed bag for emergency services agencies (ESAs) struggling to modernise legacy technology and processes. With core mobility projects now well established, emerging devices and communications channels are driving a quiet revolution in ESA service delivery that promises to finally deliver information-led emergency services.

Potentially improved outcomes are taking shape thanks to a recent flood of miniaturisation, which has fuelled demand for new technologies such as unmanned drones, body-worn video (BWV) cameras, videoconferencing and all manner of wireless environmental and situational sensors. These devices increasingly coordinate their activities through far-reaching Internet of Things (IoT) networks — connected initially by 3G and 4G mobile networks, and eventually using extremely low-powered, long-distance networks based on emerging technologies like LPWAN, Sigfox and Flexnet.

IoT technologies, paired with a flood of new information through social media channels and a host of analytics tools to make sense of it all, are set to help ESAs get on the front foot in a battle for information dominance that will help them police more effectively, fight fires more safely and save more lives than ever before.

A new world of benefits

ESAs that are struggling to cost-justify the necessary investment in time and training for such tools should think of their benefits in terms other than just better communication, said NEC Australia Solutions Director Andy Hurt.

“You start to look at what’s necessary for those kinds of algorithms that get used to analyse very complex environments, and there aren’t just outcomes in being able to make law enforcement agencies work more efficiently,” he explained. “It actually adds a new dimension, which we’ve found to be a major indicator: employee safety outcomes.”

Video-equipped unmanned drones, for example, can be flown into a fire zone ahead of firefighters to pick out risks, drop emergency supplies, identify trapped individuals or even to hover and provide wireless internet access to support ESA staff on the ground. Onboard sensors can provide invaluable information about temperature, wind speed, humidity, the presence of dangerous chemicals and other factors that can affect the safety of rescue efforts.

There is also great hope from new applications for biometrics — an area where NEC has been particularly active in recent wins with agencies such as CrimTrac and the South Australia Police. Biometrics can improve safety by enabling automated identification such as allowing police to automatically process inmates with less physical intervention — NEC’s Watch House project with the NT Police won this year’s Infrastructure and Platforms Innovation of the Year iAward.

“Our facial recognition technology platform is now rapidly identifying people brought into custody and making a significant contribution to how we conduct investigations and combat crime,” said NT Police sergeant Chris Brand upon accepting the award, who estimates the system has already eliminated 1800 hours of police administration work. “Importantly, it’s also improving overall safety and freeing officers to spend more time in-field.”

Biometric techniques are also being applied for in-field assistance, such as scanning a situation for noises from wounded people or evaluating a suspect’s emotional state through physical movements or speech patterns. “It goes beyond use cases of just recognising an individual,” Hurt said.

“It can be recognising patterns of behaviour that allow ESAs to anticipate and pre-empt certain activities. We’re finding the conversation with governments is becoming a lot more broad and the use cases are becoming much different.”

Communications

Responsiveness goes both ways. One straightforward but critical use case for ESAs emerged in the wake of the Black Saturday bushfires, where inquiries slammed the lack of an early warning system that could automatically broadcast updates and potentially life-saving information to all mobiles in an area.

Subsequent years have seen several standalone efforts merged into the Early Warning Network (EWN), a centralised alerting service whose Situation Room product “fills the gap between public alerting and national alerting systems,” director for government, enterprise and emergency management, Michael Hallowes — a former career police officer and Victorian Emergency Services Commissioner who previously served as national director of the national Emergency Alert Program — told GTR.

Situation Room allows the creation of asset and event layers that are used to track areas of interest and to direct relevant alerts to people who are currently located in those areas. Its goal is to deliver what Hallowes calls ‘decision superiority’ — “getting decision-makers the intelligence that they need, on the device of their choice, over the network of their choice”.

The innovation around the platform — which is designed to ensure messages can be transmitted to relevant people via their existing mobile phones without requiring them to monitor Facebook and a range of different mobile apps — has attracted interest from governments in Japan, the UAE, Canada, UK, Belgium and elsewhere, Hallowes said.

“People need factual information very quickly, that is relevant to their situation,” he continued. “The community is as important as the operational response. If we can inform people that they need to get out before it happens, and we don’t need to send in emergency services workers to get them out, we can focus on fighting fires and not on rescuing people.”

Social media solutions

Social media is another key frontier for ESAs, offering real-time insight into situational changes that is often impossible for responders to get in other ways. Social media services are both rich enough and widely used enough that any significant event with public implications — whether it be traffic accident, bushfire, chemical spill, injured person or persons, flooding, livestock on the road, or any of a hundred other emergencies — will create a textual, photographic and even video footprint that can be fed into ESAs’ decision-making streams if properly curated.

There’s the rub, warns Caroline Milligan, associate director of emergency management with emergency-response consultancy Crest Advisory. “Rapid adoption of social media became a pain point for agencies in public safety environments because they could only manage it and couldn’t control it,” Milligan explained.

“Communities are no longer happy to be waiting for your information; they are sensors and potential eyewitnesses, and using social technologies they can push out real-time intelligence. We saw early on that this was going to be vital potential intelligence — and there are so many ways that you can use these sensors that people meeting communities face to face should be doing due diligence to do their work ahead of time.”

That work includes finding out who are local influencers and what information they are gathering and sharing, and building lists of their social media presence so their information feeds are quickly available when they are needed.

Doing early groundwork to improve collection of social media information also paves the way for faster conversion of raw situational information into response-relevant data, thanks to large-scale analysis techniques that rely on social media monitoring and big data analysis.

“You can’t process the sort of data that is coming in in volumes, unless you’re using analytics capabilities,” EWN’s Hallowes said. “Embracing these in the spirit of collaboration in the industry is key to accelerating success. But you can’t roll these out without a communications and education plan.”

That plan must, Milligan is quick to point out, be a two-way street — engaging social media leaders as part of the ongoing emergency response. This is often easier said than done, she said, noting that “it is staggering to me how many agencies are simply using open-source tools and technologies like social media to push information out and don’t have the infrastructure to bring this intelligence to decision-makers. But in an emergency, knowledge is power.”

Painting the bigger picture

Areas of focus for any ESA include implementing effective listening strategies, considering what monitoring and geosensing technologies they are using, and refining reporting frameworks to get cohesive developments in both traditional intelligence and open-source information. Such skills may not be in ready supply within many ESAs but successfully harnessing contemporary technologies will require building or acquiring those skills.

These requirements continue to evolve based on the evolving social media landscape, and to be effective in the long term ESAs will need to continue reaching out to citizens using the channels that are most meaningful for them. This is a new imperative that will test the flexibility of agencies that have to date been largely focused on enabling their own responders with new technologies, such as in-car police terminals and rugged in-ambulance laptops.

Such projects may deliver immediate benefits for field staff but they’re just the beginning of the information-led emergency services revolution, said Steven Crutchfield, managing director of Motorola Solutions Australia.

“While [a mobility rollout] is strong with the productivity and efficiency angle, it is really laying that foundational building block of what can be done with a device in the hands of a public safety authority when connected to the broadband world,” Crutchfield said, noting that the ability to predict future activities increases as the volume of collected information increases.

“By stepping back and taking a look at this as users in the field, we’re moving towards that prediction and prevention effort that is really the Nirvana for a lot of our PSAs, Crutchfield said, noting the value of this information in fuelling a faster prototype-deployment-evaluation cycle that will put new technologies into the hands of field staff faster than ever.

“We’re seeing early wins where just looking at legacy information contained within ESAs’ systems can help them predict even 30% of the next day’s events,” he added. To demonstrate the improvements that are possible, Motorola is running a hackathon with Australian PSAs later this year to see what kind of challenges can be solved through new applications of available technologies.

NEC’s Hurt sees the current excitement around innovation as feeding a larger agenda around smart cities, which will unite sensor and information infrastructures with broader citizen-centric initiatives that will improve the relevance and responsiveness of public safety authorities.

“We’re seeing some tremendous initiatives in some of these agencies,” he said, “with very intelligent people being given latitude to explore new use cases. We can start to put together proofs of concept and bring things to life with a proper use case. This is where it’s going to start to get exciting.”

Main image courtesy NSW RFS.