By Michael Cayes
Mooring Tech, Inc.
This article is provided by Mooring Tech, Inc. and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of EMS1.
The most common use of GPS for civilians these days is navigation to the nearest Starbucks on Saturday morning. The disastrous first iterations of Apple Maps aside, most major mobile companies come standard with a map application that allows you to figure out where you are, and where you need to be. In the last two to three years, consumers have also been introduced to apps that use a phone’s built-in GPS to locate the phone if it is ever missing or stolen. Typically the flow of innovation tends to start from mainstream consumer fields and move to specialized markets such as emergency medical response and law enforcement. Given this pattern, what we can expect now is to see more advanced forms of GPS technology aimed at locating or tracking people and providing their coordinates to emergency aid workers.
NASA is already testing some of those new technologies. When an 8.1 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal in April of this year, over 9,000 people were killed and thousands more were trapped under rubble and debris. Many were in and out of consciousness; others were buried too deeply to hear and be heard by search and rescue teams. NASA sent a team out with a piece of equipment that was originally developed to find life on other worlds. Though they have thus far been unsuccessful with the machine on Mars, the rescue team was able to extract four people from the rubble in Nepal using this new technology. The machine works by sending out microwave signals that pick up on human breathing, and it works even through large debris piles or thick concrete. Appropriately called FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response) and the Nepal disaster was a trial run to see how well FINDERs will do in real-world situations.
It will be a while before funding is available to bring FINDER to your local emergency responder teams. In the meantime, cell phones do have the previously mentioned built-in GPS capabilities. It is not difficult to envision a future where citizens, who voluntarily enable their phone’s GPS, can be located by rescue crews in the event of an emergency. This scenario played out at a state park in Prescott, Arizona just last week when a hiker was reported to be dehydrated and showing ‘an altered level of consciousness.’ Rescue teams were able to obtain the woman’s coordinates through her phone and quickly came to her aid.
Another integration that could soon make its way from the public to private sector is real-time traffic imaging. With the implementation of ruggedized tablets in emergency response vehicles, there are new possibilities for software that provides tracking information over a mobile data or broadband connection to responders in the field. Consumer applications like Waze already have the capability to show accidents, construction, and other barriers, and provide alternative routes where they exist. The need for faster, more accurate, and more adaptable GPS for emergency services is driving the creation of a whole new market of innovative programs, and it looks like tech companies are just getting started.