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Entries » Blog » Public Safety Enters The Collective Intelligence Era Author: Paul Steinberg

Public Safety Enters The Collective Intelligence Era Author: Paul Steinberg

Created May 02 2014, 5:00 AM by Paul Jeffs

High-speed, Mission-critical Wireless Communications Help First responders Overcome Public Safety Enemy Number One: the Unknown

It's often said that what you don't know can't hurt you. But in public safety, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, perhaps the biggest challenge first responders face is being forced to deal with the unknown.

Public safety CIOs are tasked with the important job of making sure the right information gets to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. Over the years, the quality of information and the ways it can be collected and communicated have improved substantially. And more recently, we entered the era of “collective intelligence,” where everybody and an ever-increasing number of “things” can produce and consume information. It's not simply pushed out to individuals in the field, but is shared among team members and disparate teams via two-way broadband communication technology to increase situational awareness.

For example, each individual or team at an incident scene has a unique perspective and can collect information that may be unknown to others. Next generation public safety wireless communication networks will make it possible for everyone on the team – from dispatch to command to individual first responders – to access, contribute and share critical information in real-time.

 

The collective intelligence era correlates with the advent of the ubiquitous broadband wireless internet, smart devices, cloud computing and social networking. Essentially, we are taking the social networking phenomenon and applying it to public safety in a structured way. Agencies are communicating and collaborating in a social, interactive way over land mobile radio (LMR) and broadband networks. Public safety professionals are able to interactively collaborate over a variety of communication technologies and portable devices to bring up-to-the-instant knowledge to response teams as events evolve and are resolved.

For example, a SWAT team dealing with a hostage situation can use two-way streaming video for communications and collaboration. High performance bi-directional communications allow the “feet on the street” to not just access the collective, but dynamically contribute content to it. Video is captured on the scene by officers on the ground, in vehicles or in helicopters, by the general population, or it may be filmed by robots or drones.

Constant feeds of images and information from different perspectives are streamed to the on-scene mobile command unit. The team leader then directs the video feeds to provide responders with the most relevant information, and disseminates the video to whoever needs it to enhance safety with improved situational awareness.

Collective intelligence is just as critical on a fire scene, for example, at a chemical plant. Incident command centers and individual firefighters can access a wealth of real-time information on wireless broadband devices such as ruggedized handheld computers. Each team member can gain immediate access to building details such as floor plans, sensor inputs, location of hazardous materials and more. They can also get streaming video from various angles and perspectives. When the incident commander in the mobile command center views live footage from a helicopter or drone, he sees what the team on the ground can't see: that the cut they're about to make to vent the roof is being made in a less than optimal place. The commander annotates the video to the team leader, who then moves the venting operation to a more effective location.

Public Safety LTE will be essential to deliver exceptional real-time situational awareness and allow managers to prioritize and pre-empt traffic whenever necessary in emergency situations. Although still in the planning process, FirstNet – the (U.S.) nation's proposed coast-to-coast interoperable public safety broadband network – will ultimately enable first responders in every part of the U.S. to communicate and collaborate with others in times of statewide, regional or national emergencies like hurricanes, major floods or acts of terrorism.

Bottom line – collective intelligence systems help save first responders and the public from the dangers of the unknown. It's also a future paradigm enabled by technology. We can only imagine how it will play out based on advancements in broadband networks, portable devices and public safety applications.

Paul Steinberg is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Motorola Solutions, Inc.

Join the Motorola Solutions Community EMEA at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Motorola-Solutions-Community-6519590/about

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