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by gregsadetsky·8y ago·view on hn ↗
This is an extraordinarily important and interesting “space” ripe for innovation.

A few weeks ago, I was awarded one of the highest civilian public awards from the Commandant of the US Coast Guard in DC for my volunteer web mapping work during Harvey. That work helped coordinate 700 helicopter sorties and save 1700 lives.

I’ve been thinking — and talking with Emergency Responders — about what an up to date 911 would look like. Location is a huge part of it. Texting, sending images and videos would also be on the timeline.

Consider how much real-time location info — and live HD video streams — can 1 mobile phone produce, and how close to none of that is available in an emergency situation.

Consider how 911 is but one service, and that this is a worldwide problem. And that smartphones are worldwide too, and that there’s hundreds of millions of them.

I’m starting to plan out next steps. Connecting smartphones and emergency responders. Being a worldwide emergency digital-first dispatch service.

Imagine!

16 comments
I built this about 6 years ago with Lloyd's of London as the underwriter for medical evacuation and search & rescue services. We were way to early for smartphone market, but the GEOS response team behind FindMeSpot.com can be contracted by anyone. http://www.geosworldwide.com/

The challenge for any private company is that the solution needs to be completely integrated into both the device and behavioral patterns need to be re-learned. For most people (in the US), calling 9-11 has been engrained since they were a child. In a moment of panic, it's the first or second reaction... not loading a 3rd party app. While not impossible, convincing Apple or Google to let you own "SOS+" capabilities would be a tall order...

Spot has succeed in the adventure market by owning the device and behavior change being easy to manage with no cell service. Just about everyone I know who has a mountain home, sailboat, or frequently travels to remote places – has purchased Spot.

If I was a VC, I would be interested in a roll-up strategy... GEOS and Spot aren't the only solutions.

I absolutely agree that any new solution will need to be transparent / obvious / non-3rd party app based.

While getting Apple and Google on board may seem like a tall order (I’m sure it is), both have implemented 112’s AML spec natively. Google is also driving this with their Android ELS efforts.

Having emergency responders, and public opinion, on the side of this happening should convince both A and G to look into this.

... and yes, replace the SOS dialpad (!) with something better.

It does seem like Google has already quietly done this with Android's ELS https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...
Maybe the 3rd party app could be opened when 911 is dialed instead of a phone call being made?
When you get to the stage of concrete work on this, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com and maybe we can arrange an AMA-like discussion about it. I think the community would likely find that interesting.
Thank you, dang. I love and owe this community a lot, and would be thrilled to involve it.
I worked on 911 reporting software oh 6 or 7 years ago now, and I seem to remember talk about allowing SMS and MMS along with live-streamed video coming from mobile phones to the PSAPs ... but I guess there hasn't been much movement on that.

I think the trouble you'll run into is the various agencies involved (since it's been quite a while I don't really remember), e.g. the Sheriff's departments run the PSAPs and I believe the State requires reporting for funding. And since these are government contracts you have to deal with getting those contracts and whatever contracts they already have with incumbents.

Not only that but there's a ton of different equipment out there, and everybody is using different stuff.

Anyway not saying it can't be done and that it can't be done efficiently (because believe me it can), but it's 100% government so you're gonna need some patience, good sales guys, and lobbyists.

edit: congrats on the award BTW, that sounds like you did some great work.

I’d love to talk more if you can. Email in my profile.

My plan is to do this as a nonprofit. Build great mapping tools and offer them for free to all worldwide emergency responders.

PSAPs have a role in this, of course, but I am also wondering how much smartphone emergency requests could be routed directly to responders. Think of the Coast Guard’s VHF 16 emergency channel. It doesn’t go to 911 — it goes straight to the Coast Guard.

I realize you can’t necessarily comment on individual deployments, but I’d like to publicly shame Vacaville, CA’s e911 combined with Verizon and/or iPhone plain doesn’t work. Contacting the FCC, Verizon determined they were sending valid position information but the city/county weren’t necessarily using it correctly. All it takes is for a rape/murder to happen and police unable to get to a victim because of it for some heads to roll, but unfortunately, it will take death(s) before such a problem is resolved.
There's at least SMS/MMS in some US PSAPs. The area where I used to live had it a few years ago: http://fox6now.com/2016/01/10/in-the-event-of-an-emergency-y...
A lot of what you are imagining is already a reality in many areas. Our company takes care of pretty much all of the services in a PSAP; call-taking, computer aided dispatch, map, and radio dispatch, plus records and jail management for law enforcement. All the systems work together and it is absolutely possible for a dispatcher to patch a caller into a radio talkgroup, individual call, or to a first responders cell phone... it just isn't very useful and it is hardly ever done in real life.

Mobile CAD and RMS are catching on as well so in many departments, first responders can see and hear everything going on in dispatch from their tablets or laptops if they want. They can see what calls are active, what units are assigned to them, and actually interact with the caller if it is allowed. Again, this isn't always that useful. Staff in dispatch almost always have a better understanding of what is going on big picture wise and are already on top of allocating resources and clearing information. Going around them is not all that helpful. Silent dispatch is nice for beat work. It's great when CAD automatically creates incidents in RMS that LE can easily pull into reports... including recordings of the 911 calls etc.

There are popular smartphone apps like active 911, Bryx911, edispatch ,and iamresponding that are great for first responders, especially volunteers. These apps sync with the CAD system in dispatch and offer alert/response, mapping, and messaging features.

The space changes slowly, but it is very much changing and adapting to the smartphone era. FirstNet will probably accelerate these kinds of changes, which is a good thing... but I am sure it will introduce its own set of problems.

This sounds amazing.

I recently witnessed an intoxicated man collapse on the street in front of me, so I was first on scene and had to call our local version of 911 (I live in Australia). Of course I am asked where I am, the address and street, and I had no idea. I was at the bus stop I walk to everyday, surrounded by building with names I couldn't read very well at night, and no street signs near me. I was eventually able to work it out, but that was precious moments we lost that could have made things significantly worse in a different case.

The man was passed out cold (he had hit his head very hard when he fell) and had a very weak pulse and weak breathing, I performed CPR until the ambulance arrived and he started to regain consciousness. The ambulance took a very long time to arrive and then find us, I had to get other bystanders to stand out in the street to wave and shout. When the ambulance left he was fully conscious and able to converse with the officers.

This whole thing of course seemed absurd, as we were all carrying smartphones equipped with HD cameras, GPS, and radios.

In another case, during the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, I was lucky to be involved in a volunteer group which started offering free support services to those on the ground. We ran a text information service where people could text in questions, including asking for the nearest help center based on their location (which they had to provide via text). We would likewise respond over text. We were able to help people find the help they needed, by making it available over text we also were able to reduce the already overloaded cellular services (voice calls are much more expensive than text). We helped dispatch appropriate emergency services to people in need, but it was still very much copying address information as text between various jury rigged systems (written by us during the incident).

I hope we can improve these systems in the coming years, it is especially important to improve them to be redundant to things such as cellular system overload (which is very common during major crisis).

New Zealand has actually rolled out location relay for 111 [1]. They've also managed to do it in a way that seems to keep privacy in mind, the location is deleted after 60 minutes. It's only for Android phones though.

Anyway, it's a great initiative, and one where the possible privacy implications seem to have been mitigated, while providing a massive benefit.

[1] https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/new-emergency-11...

https://www.fastcompany.com/40475242/how-a-hacker-helped-the...
Cheers :)

For those who can read/understand (or are learning) French, here’s a recent radio interview (there’s a photo of the medal as well in the article):

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/medium-large/...

> Imagine!

I am, and it scares the hell out of me. If I have to choose between having emergency responders possibly not being able to locate me, and having the government be able to track my every move along with everyone else's, it's not even a hard choice: I'll take the former as by far the lesser of the two evils.

Being able to reliably hide my location is every bit as important to personal freedom as being able to encrypt my communications. If that means I have to take some additional steps to summon help in an emergency, so be it. It's a price I'll happily pay. Life's quality metric is a vector, and safety is not the only dimension.

This is not about opening a backdoor that would allow 911/etc. to request your phone’s location.

It’s only about sending your location when you specifically ask for help in an emergency situation.

—

That being said, mobile phones are inherently trackable by mobile carriers using triangulation. I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth considering that staying untrackable with a mobile is, as far as I understand, fundamentally impossible.

> It’s only about sending your location when you specifically ask for help in an emergency situation.

No, it's not. Go back and re-read the comment I was responding to. Pay particular attention to the following passages:

> Consider how much real-time location info — and live HD video streams — can 1 mobile phone produce, and how close to none of that is available in an emergency situation.

> Consider how 911 is but one service, and that this is a worldwide problem. And that smartphones are worldwide too, and that there’s hundreds of millions of them.

The GP is specifically talking about expanding the capability beyond just location and beyond just 911, and talking about this as if it were a foregone conclusion that this will be an unalloyed good. That is what scares me.

The GP is me. :)

I apologize if my original comment was not clear, or could leave itself open to a different interpretation.

I really did mean that when someone in an emergency situation needs help, presently, they do not have the ability to send their location, a text message, an image or a video.

That’s it — I was only referring to emergency situations, and anything that I am discussing would be user-initiated.

>> it's not even a hard choice: I'll take the former as by far the lesser of the two evils.

Right or wrong, I think you're in the extreme minority here.

Edit: I'm not necessarily speaking for myself here, but then I'm in a low-risk area and demographic, so am not especially likely to need 911. But I think the average "man on the street" would not give a second thought about it.

I don't know how "extreme" the minority is, but yes, most people seem to choose safety over freedom. It's a defensible choice. But it should be a choice, not the default assumption.
> most people seem to choose safety over freedom

I don't think that's true as often as our pessimistic sides would assume:

People risk their lives for freedom, in fighting wars, in challenging oppressors, in trying to escape. To say it more dramatically: A few people once agreed to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their honor for liberty, not the other way around.

No he is not. Do not confuse 'minority' with 'people comfortable expressing unpopular opinions'.
Except that they're often (usually?) one and the same. If the opinion was popular, it wouldn't be minority.
What scare you? That by calling 911 you allow them to see and hear what you do? It's easy to extrapolate and use the "slippery slope" argument but that doesn't make sense here.

It's an emergency, you are calling an emergency line. That line should have priority access to information while you are calling for help.

Don't want any of that?... Well I guess don't call the emergency line... or whatever...

There are valid reasons to call the emergency line when you are not the one experiencing the emergency, and thus you don't wish your privacy to be compromised.

I'm reminded a bit of the sanctuary city debate. Sanctuary cities are doing their best to let anyone call for help without worrying about whether immigration will be the first responders.

Anyway, I think there's some excessive paranoia in this discussion, but there is nonetheless a kernel of a valid point.

In fact the only times I ever called 911 I was calling for someone else, and I wanted my identity protected. If 911 would have broadcasted my identity I would not have called.
How can I be sure that the underlying mechanism doesn't have a back door that allows anyone with access to track me all the time?

Your argument is very similar to the argument advanced by the government for key escrow and other backdoors in encryption systems: this mechanism will only be used with proper legal safeguards to catch "bad guys". Don't you want that?

No, I don't. I really don't.

How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now?

I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.

Can’t the government already locate phones for missing persons? I don’t know if that requires a warrant or what, but I seem to remember hearing about locating the last “ping” of a phone to a tower for many missing persons cases.
Yes, but that's very different from having the phone send out GPS coordinates, which are orders of magnitude more accurate. Also, there's no way to avoid triangulating your location from phone-tower pinging. That's just inherent in the way cell phones work. But sending GPS info is (or at least should be) optional.
> Can’t the government already locate phones for missing persons?

Yes, but in the past that's required a warrant. Has that changed?

I was envisioning a system where dialing 911 sent additional location data to the emergency service, but I can completely understand having serious concerns about the privacy cost and the other risks associated with any such system.
The government can already track you reasonably accurately using cell tower triangulation, and have been able to for decades.

If you're emitting any sort of signal, the government can track you. That ship sailed about 70 years ago.

Build software that integrates with popular 911 centre software; a local muncipality somewhere will trial it. Work with them to get it in the hands of the citizens there and let it grow out.

Simultaneously, get it in to small rescue outfits (For example, a 26 mile lake close to my home has a volunteer boat rescue service) for free and promote it around closed communities (Hillwalkers, climbers, or in my case, marina members) where it can easily spread.

Building the software upfront for 911 integration means when the big boys finally take notice, you're ready to get involved with them asap, before anyone else can

Its a risky upfront strategy but it helps with what others have discussed in this thread - When you need Apple to support you to integrate further with them, you're the one holding the cards and presenting an easier option than building out their own alternative.

Chew the world up one city at a time

Yup. But the issue is a financial one, not a technological one. All manner of things can be accomplished at the origin. But all the other links in the chain must have access to the companion technology (read money). This is just not available on a widespread basis. Then, you have issues of adoption, and, competing services and standards.

We are experiencing this very thing with regards to Fire dispatch, with all manner of fireman 'apps'. All of which are different with different protocols. So much so, that we now refuse to support any of them.

I’d love to talk more, if you can. My email in my profile.

As stated in a comment above, I think that this should be a global nonprofit. Mapping tools should be made for free to emergency responders. That’s one way to go around the financial question.

There is a rather sizable and mature industry providing mapping products for first responders.
Maybe this is what you meant, but it seems possible that you could just publish your data through your own protocol, and allow the apps to read it in that form if they want? Or perhaps I've misunderstood your position in this...
FYI, most US SAR teams use websites which basically just call "getCurrentPosition()" to get GPS coordinates from lost subjects. i.e. they leave a voicemail/text subject with a link to a website, and they can push a button on that site to send coordinates from the Geolocation API to SAR.
Excellent!

I led a Hacking 4 Defence style problem solving sessions that saw the development of an idea that included:

open source review of native app source code

partnering with national carriers to embed app on device at point of sale

provide Humanitarian and Disaster Relief(HADR) “ground truth” immediately overlayed on a heat map to reduce disaster reconnaissance needs(ie Haiti)

everyone in the 3rd world has a smartphone.

tie the app into semiautomatic mesh network functionality(we saw mobile cell towers fail in power outages here in Christchurch, Nz in 2011 Earthquake).

tie the app into emergency HADR network(tethered dirigible with suspended coms/retrans)

*tie the app into an emergency mobile network consisting of coms/retrains in every next generation first responders vehicle.

So many opportunities to leverage off the shelf tech for first responder & disaster management intelligence gathering and dissemination done in an appropriate way with high public trust.

Congrats on your award and thanks for your Harvey work. As a former Houstonian, that event is close to my heart.
Learn about how not to implement it by downloading this "My MDA" app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=il.org.mda.mym... (careful Hebrew there, but app UI is in English)
Are you familiar with the work of Mark43? I visited their office in NYC last summer and they seem to be doing some good work with LEOs across the country modernizing their tech (especially with respect to dispatch).

https://www.mark43.com/

Citizen is doing things around this [1]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sp0n.citizen&h...

There's some work in this area already, e.g. https://www.goodsamapp.org/.
Thanks for the link. I think that this needs to be on mobile OS level to be effective. The good news is that there are only 2 major ones.

See https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/ and the 112 (the EU’s 911) work on AML. That service, piggybacking on SMS to send location, is supported by both Android and iOS but is only available in a few countries.