First Responders Get More Emergency Communications Options

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing a prototype two-way radio emergency communications system for emergency crews – and the technology could be a boon for emergency response teams.

In an article on the ComputerWorld website, Matt Hamblin says NIST demonstrated the prototype last week at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass. NIST says the system features smart multihop relay devices, called breadcrumbs. The relay devices run software that can notify emergency crews when they need to place another of the breadcrumbs along their route to extend the range of communications down a hallway or tunnel.

“The system uses off-the-shelf microprocessors and other standard hardware along with the NIST-developed software, which monitors the status of radio communications signals,” Hamblin says. “NIST said the software can rapidly assess the strength of the signal that emergency workers are receiving, so they can get an alert before they walk out of range and lose contact with the last relay device.

Nader Moayeri, a member of NIST’s development team, told Hamblin that workers such as firefighters lay down conventional breadcrumb relay devices in certain standard locations, such as stairwells, or at a set distance from one another in a corridor. But Moayeri also said these approaches don't take into account all the environmental variables that can degrade a communications signal.

Instead, the new prototype system has two versions; one for the 900-MHz communication channel and the other for the 2.4-GHz channel. NIST said it is willing to share the prototypes with businesses and other organizations working on first-responder communications systems.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=15&articleId=9111967&intsrc=hm_topic