Real-time location for incident management

The priority for any emergency plan is to:

  • Prevent fatalities and injuries

  • Reduce damage to buildings, stock, and equipment

  • Protect the environment and the community

But workplaces or campuses contain hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of individuals spread across expansive areas and multi-story buildings. Knowing how to locate, communicate, and assist them is fundamental and challenging. Ensuring people have quick and efficient access to security and emergency services, and Responders or Security know exactly where to go is imperative.

People deserve the right to live, work, and study in safe environments.

Why does indoor mobile location matter?

We are spending more time indoors, over 80% of 9-1-1 calls are from a mobile device, and 60% from inside a building. As an example in a school environment, 84% of teenagers and students now own a mobile device and many employees rely on their mobile devices to communicate rather than office landlines.

All current location technologies used by safety apps or software, including 9-1-1, use crowd-sourced data or imprecise GPS. These offer NO indoor location visibility and no useable vertical location such as a floor level. These technologies are unreliable and imprecise during mass critical events.

Current investments being made are not resolving the problem of ineffective indoor navigational awareness:

  • The number of full-time campus law enforcement officers grew 16 % between 2005 and 2012, but shootings continue to increase.

  • By 2018 campus security spending exceeded $400 million a year, but schools still don’t have accurate indoor location visibility or awareness.

It’s the Law

Schools, campuses and corporations are required to comply with several regulations/ legislations as a direct result of mass shootings:

  • Alyssa’s Law is legislation which specifically requires public elementary and secondary schools to be equipped with “silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement”. The purpose of Alyssa’s Law is to decrease the amount of time it takes for first responders to arrive at an emergency—whether it’s a shooting, a natural disaster, or any other unforeseen event.

  • Ray Baum Act is aimed at improving emergency response outcomes in all environments by focusing on the importance of sharing precise location information when calling 9-1-1 emergency services. Section 506 of the Act introduces rules to ensure caller’s dispatchable location is provided to emergency dispatch, including room number and floor level.

How EML helps

Effective communication which interconnects private, public, and Emergency 9-1-1 teams is essential to ANY Emergency/ Crisis Management Plan.

Underpinning that plan is location, knowing immediately and exactly WHERE your people are, so you can send help to the right place, at the right time. 

Stringent security measures and effective crisis management protects students, employees, and visitors. Many organizations view these solutions as an inevitable part of their infrastructure. But adequate security is often a balancing act between budgetary and regulatory requirements, alongside interoperability with current systems and privacy concerns. And now, given the current economic climate, and the surge in mass shooting events, these needs have become even more critical.

Whether it’s a planned event or a crisis scenario, how are you managing your ever-evolving responsibilities towards soft target safety ? If you are a security and safety professional you are laser-focused on student and employee safety, emergency response optimization, and incident management. Your pain points include:

  • Efficient and Effective response to the event

  • Inaccurate indoor location capabilities, and low visibility especially for multi-level buildings.

  • Inability to “reach” everyone

  • Increasing costs of guards/security employees.

  • Mobile device proliferation amongst your students/ employees

  • Rise in more violent incidents

  • High technology costs and interoperability.

  • Privacy and handling of discreet information

  • Regulation compliance (Ray Baum Act), provision of dispatchable location

  • Size, space, ingress, egress, and geography of your corporate space or campus.

  • Improving the mental health of your employees, staff, and students through more established and intrinsic security measures.

Having best-in-class indoor and vertical mobile locations as the foundation to that emergency plan, or incorporated into your current security APP, improves not only the response time to the emergency but also where in the building Responders need to go!

EML provides detailed life-saving location data to school administrators, faculty, security personnel, and first responders, allowing for best-in-class incident assessment and management, and improved event remediation.