WHEN her BMW skidded off the road and plunged into a 10-metre-deep canal near Miami, Florida, in February 2001, the driver had time to dial 911 as her car slowly sank. “I’m not sure where I am,” she told the emergency dispatch operator. With the emergency services unable to find her car, she drowned minutes later.
Tragedies like this are galvanising those who want to see positioning technologies used automatically in all emergency communications. From cellphones that broadcast your position when you make an emergency call, to systems that remotely turn on your TV set to warn of local disasters, digital technology is now being harnessed to make people safer.
The most imminent of the new technologies is “Enhanced 911” – a system emerging in the US that piggybacks a cellphone’s location details onto 911 emergency calls. The US Federal Communications Commission has ruled that cellphone networks must be able to pinpoint a user’s position with an accuracy of about 100 metres by the end of 2005.
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To achieve this, new phones will have to be fitted with GPS receivers. Two mobile networks, Verizon Wireless and Sprint, are already including GPS receivers in all their new handsets. Old non-GPS phones can fix their position using triangulation: measuring how long it takes signals to reach three nearby phone masts. All networks will need to be able to triangulate anyway, because GPS doesn’t work inside buildings.
Europe is approaching the problem in a different way, counting on the fact that phone companies will soon be offering location capability without any EU mandate, as a result of predicted demand for “nearest restaurant” style location services. “Europe is two to three years behind the US on this,” says David Williams, an E-911 expert in Wilton, Connecticut.
But E-911 is just part of a much broader effort to revamp US emergency communications, says Ken Allen, executive director of Washington DC-based pressure group Partnership for Public Warning. The Department of Homeland Security and the FCC are under increasing pressure from PPW and other groups, who say today’s Emergency Alert System (EAS) for contacting civilians, which dates back to the cold war, lags woefully behind the possibilities offered by digital communications.
“We have technology just sitting there that could be saving lives,” says Clay Freinwald, who is chairman of the Washington State EAS board and also a tech-savvy member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.
So what’s wrong with EAS? It issues warnings from central or local government, or weather centres, which are then transmitted automatically by US TV and radio broadcasters, including cable channels. But this means you’ll only receive warning of a nearby tornado or chemical spill, say, if you happen to be watching TV or listening to the radio. “EAS doesn’t work because it only reaches a few people,” says Peter Ward, co-founder of the PPW. “EAS is a relic, a dinosaur.”
What’s really needed is a way to switch on a TV when it’s off – or rather, on standby. In fact, just such a technology exists, activating your set in response to a digital “switch-on-from-standby” signal. This is already included in the Alert Guard TV set from RCA, which flashes up weather alerts or emergency warnings. PPW wants RCA’s technology, or something similar, mandated for all new sets.
But of course, such sets are no use if you are not at home when disaster strikes. So lobby groups are recommending sending alerts to cellphones, PDAs and email accounts as well. The range of potential channels is almost endless. In theory, all you need to receive an alert is a device with some kind of display screen or speaker, says Ward. That includes GPS systems in cars, and smart watches, such as the Microsoft Spot watch, which are equipped with an FM radio and screen.
Ward recently helped lobby for a system in Arizona and Washington that sends out details on abductions, via text and email messages, to media outlets and to members of the public who have signed up. For example, it might broadcast the license plate of a kidnapper’s car or a description of the child or abductor. Called the Amber Alert Web Portal Consortium, it is an extension of the Amber Alert system that began broadcasting the same data to highway signs in 1996. So far Ward’s system only handles abduction alerts.
But alerts are one thing – getting people to take notice is another. Bombarding the public with warnings could desensitise people so much that they ignore them, says Mark Allen, head of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters in Olympia.
What’s more, Katherine Albrecht of consumer privacy group Caspian in Nashua, New Hampshire, fears such technology could be used by governments to spread fear, or could end up in the hands of spammers. “It’s a slippery slope. Once the capability exists to turn on a TV remotely, then even if the government behaves itself, you will see advertisers trying to access it,” Albrecht says.
