i3 - March/April 2019 - 15

By Mike Bergman

Tech

PIPE LINE

Extending Consumer Tech to Save Lives

Chris Cheadle/Alamy

magine a firefighter in a
burning apartment
building. The room is
dark and filled with smoke.
Our first responder has a flashlight, goggles, radio and oxygen, but is unfamiliar with the
layout of the room, not to
mention the furniture. Some
parts of the room could be
dangerously hot or on fire.
There are other first responders in adjacent rooms and
floors. How could consumer
technology help?

A government group is asking that
question. The Public Safety
Communications Research (PSCR)
Division is part of the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST) in
the Department of Commerce. PSCR
works with academia and industry,
funding new and better ways to solve
problems facing our first responders.
Using PSCR's vision, we can give firefighters better tools. First, provide a
next-generation radio, one that uses
modern mesh networking spectrum efficient technologies. But it's inefficient to
start from scratch on communications
technologies. It's more cost effective to
add new features to an existing industry
standard. The preferred path here is to
enable an upgrade from current Land
Mobile Radio to something with the
power of LTE behind it.
It may seem odd to have an LTE
radio for firefighters, since LTE is better known as the wireless network standard for voice and data on smartphones
created by the industry's collaboration
project, 3GPP. But PSCR researchers
can participate in the 3GPP standard
development process - just as CTA
standard participants are involved in
C TA . t e c h / i 3

CTA working groups - and get new features added to the standard.
PSCR researchers have been working
to incorporate first responder needs,
such as push-to-talk; getting a signal
through to deep interior or basement
rooms; or operating without a functional base station nearby. The 3GPP
standard has been evolving as a result,
with these additional capabilities entering the technology starting with the
standard's 12th iteration in 2015 and
continuing through to today.

Tech Tools

Aside from the radio, we can do more
for this scenario. Goggles are fine, but a
full augmented reality (AR) heads-up
display would be better. The room is
dark, but let's assume the local fire marshal mapped it out on a previous visit via
a LiDAR-based backpack system that
can be carried on annual fire safety
inspections. We can use analytics to
identify sprinkler heads or identify and
geo-tag important elements. Infrared
sensors can add heat signatures as an
overlay on the AR display, and other
technologies can help identify other first
responders in adjacent rooms or floors.

This data might be wrapped up for the AR
display in something like Edgybees technology, which - according to their website
- "fuses computer vision, multi-sensor
data analytics and 3D video generation."
As these technologies are brought
together in applications, standards will
enable expanding at scale. CTA
recently launched the R12 Augmented
Reality/Virtual Reality Committee, a
group that has already kicked off work
in common terms and definitions, and
standardizing accessories.
Eventually such research topics are productized and often standardized. Industry
standards are essential in communications
systems, even more so for mission critical
systems that must be deployed at scale.
Dereck Orr, the division chief of the
Public Safety Communications Division at
NIST's Communications Technology
Laboratory, agrees. "On future features and
applications, we know that we must get to
a standardized approach, but we need technological solutions to these problems first.
We need to see the technology that will
meet public safety's requirements, then we
can coordinate on standardization."
Learn more at PSCR's website
(https://www.nist.gov/ctl/pscr).
MARCH/APRIL 2019

https://www.nist.gov/ctl/pscr

i3 - March/April 2019

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