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Indoor Tracking Technology for Emergency Response -- Current State of the Art
More than 80 emergency response and public safety
specialists attended the first ever “Precision Indoor Personnel Location and Tracking for Emergency Responders”
workshop held at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) campus in Worcester, MA. Ron Cobb of Soneticom thought that the
workshop was very productive in that technology developers were able to better understand the needs of response teams and
that response teams were better able to understand the challenges of this technology.
About 10 vendors presented their technologies that constitute either tactical or rescue systems, or, in some case, both. This can also be categorized looking from the device perspective –devices can be either “task-level” or “strategic-level.” As an example, rescue operations are about navigating to a victim in a maze and tactical operations are about accountability and resource management. For rescue operations, a rescue personnel needs to find the shortest path to the victim using the task-level device. For tactical operations, the incident commander wants to know roughly where his people are located using a strategic-level device (i.e., displayed on a computer screen). Visit indoorLBS.com for survey results of the 10 vendors’ technologies that includes positioning accuracies, deployment ranges, cost, and other metrics. The focus of the workshop was on zero pre-installed infrastructure tracking systems that do not require any previously installed wiring or equipment in the target building. Hence, systems that are dependent on RFID tags or Wi-Fi access points installed in a building do not qualify. Furthermore, the focus was on systems which provide complete tracking and position information on all equipped personnel to the incident command post. Simpler approaches (“homing devices”) were also presented. As part of my introductory presentation I gave an overview of the need for and current status of Local Positioning Systems (LPS) for Emergency Response. I used the DHS Advanced 3D Locator System as an example of a system that is currently in development. The users of the DHS system include the following groups:
The need for such a system is illustrated
from the following statistics. There are about 2 million emergency responders in the US. Their mission is to save lives,
while staying alive themselves. Reoccurring failures and user error have led to firefighter fatalities and injuries –
Fatalities: 117 in 2004 (USFA); Fireground: 37,976 injuries; Total injuries: 80,800 in 2004 (NFPA).
However, a lack of status, condition, location, task, resource, threat, and exit accessibility
information, or inability to convey this information among emergency responders, strike teams, and incident command can result
in civilian and responder casualties. In short, firefighting is making a lot of decisions on little information. Errors occur
to human error, lack of visualization, monitoring. Figure 3 portrays one example of an advanced system developed by AetherWire
& Location (a company that was not present at the workshop, but I think it deserves attention in this article.)
Some of the required performance measures of the DHS Advanced
3D Locator System are the following: Most important is for the LPS system to determine real-time three-dimensional positional location
information within structures, and to transmitting data through buildings, structures, and/or rubble to an incident command
vehicle or station outside, preferably without the use of repeaters inside the structure. WPI researchers claim that what’s needed is a system for rapidly deployable position
determination and tracking of personnel, particularly emergency service personnel over relatively short ranges of emergency
response operations. Development of a deployable operations-scale capability is important for at least two reasons: (1) it
will greatly increase emergency response efficiency, improving results with limited human resources, and (2) it will provide
a quantum step increase in personal safety and recovery of responders. Finally, cost of new technology is often a factor impeding its adoption in budget-constrained environments.
Thus a system must be developed that minimizes the cost of the mobile personnel tags. The dual-use opportunities of the
personnel location system considered here promise to also lead to significantly reduced costs. Mobile unit can consist simply
of a low cost, low complexity transmitter (of appropriate, uniquely identifiable signals) while the multi-channel reception,
signal processing complexity, power consumption, etc. of the system is shifted to the small number of base stations. Proximity control systems, which operate by sensing the
proximity of a tag to a sensor, exist today. Traditional uses include inventory control and tracking of persons within a
controlled environment. Enhancement of proximity technology has led to systems, which can determine range of the tag with
respect to one or more sensors, and hence can determine position of the tag. These systems determine 2-D tag floor-position
with either range-range or range-angle location sensor units in a pre-wired infrastructure located in virtually every compartment
of the coverage space. Each of the existing technologies have limitations, so currently, no system based on a single technology
appears to address all scenarios and conditions. It may be necessary to combine multiple technologies, such as UWB and Ultrasound
or TV in order to allow continuous tracking of teams in buildings and differentiate between different elevations, floors
and roofs. What other additional technologies may provide acceptable performance? Ad hoc networking, sometimes called mesh networking, has often been mentioned as a solution for
adapting a radio network to the requirements for reliable communication in an unpredicted network deployment or topology.
However, indoor deployments of firefighters do not necessarily support a mesh (grid) of networked radios, and the line of
relays from inside to outside is a difficult topology for radio access protocols. In order to implement 3D tracking using
UWB systems it is necessary to provide performance metrics for non-line-of-sight localization of emergency responders and
create a comprehensive digital library of experimentally-derived building material electromagnetic penetration properties
that will enable the development of accurate 3D tracking systems for emergency responders operating within buildings. NIST
and DHS are currently developing a performance matrix for various building types. Personally, the workshop seemed to emphasize the positioning, tracking, and navigation
technologies for firefighters, but not much was explored in terms of technologies for locating the civilians. There are
4,000 civilian fatalities every year (USFA). I see the emergency response challenge starting with locating the civilians
first, which will save time for the firefighters in saving the civilians while saving themselves. With that, a civilian
casualty location and assessment system is also needed; a system capable of locating (in three dimensions) the position of
casualties within a collapsed structure as well as providing basic information on the victim's vitality status.
The former is potentially possible by implementing the Rosum chip in cell phones, which can locate cell phone devices with
10m accuracy. (Rosum is also developing a local-area beacons that use signal-types similar to ATSC for positioning, making
the user devices compatible with both regular TV and the beacons. Thus, says Guttorm Opshaug of Rosum, “first
responders will experience a seamless transition between the two systems. As the beacon system comes on-line at the
site of an incident, the users -- many of which may already be inside a structure -- will experience an improvement of accuracy
from 10s of meters down to the 6-m range.”) Case
in point, there are about 200 million US wireless subscribers (Jupiter Research, 2005 projection); and, more than 30% of
911 calls in the US originate from mobile phones--a number expected to soon outpace 911 wire-line calls, according to NENA.
Further, 62% of all calls in the US are made from cell phones (CTIA) and it’s obvious that most people spend most of
their time indoors. The workshop attendees did not dispute that finding civilians trapped in buildings under an emergency
condition is more important than locating first responders. But while a first responder can be made to wear some gadget
to make localization possible, the same can not be said about civilians. Assuming everybody has a cell phone in their
pockets is a big assumption, even if you assume you can get adequate localization performance from cellular technology,
which is currently still a big if. A current development
is that FCC has called upon Network Reliability and Interoperability (NRIC) to present recommendations
to clarify issues surrounding wireless location accuracy requirements. The stakeholders include wireless industry, the Public
Safety community, and the E911 industry in general. Efforts within the Emergency Services Interconnection Forum
(ESIF) subcommittee are critical to the implementation of NRIC’s recommendations, including the indoor versus
outdoor location testing recommendation, which states that all parties agree to 5% of test calls must be conducted from
indoor locations for compliance and maintenance testing. Why only 5%? The 5% value was chosen because “no data currently
exists that defines the actual number of wireless 9-1-1 calls made from indoors and because of practical limitations of
location technologies currently deployed.” Nonetheless, independent verification of claims made by industry is very
important, particularly in this area where relatively little is known. As a firefighter and technical developer Ron
Cobb believe that “a realistic set of requirements needs to be established for Rescue Operations and that further analysis
and operational concepts need to be generated before a realistic set of Tactical requirements can be defined. That
was probably the greatest insight that I took from the workshop other than the fact that we still don't have a solution.” I also presented what the In-Building Wireless Alliance
(IBWA) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are doing. The IBWA is an advocacy for wireless
commercial real estate, which includes public safety uses of in-building wireless solutions. The OGC is embarking on a rather
aggressive testbed, OGC Web Services 4, that is addressing outdoor and indoor location in the context of geospatial, location
services, and sensor web standards; all wrapped around a number of scenarios related to emergency management/response, urban
management, HLS and defense and intelligence. Additionally, OGC has an alliance with IAI International to work cooperatively
on the convergence of the "as built" and geospatial environments via open standards. One effort underway
relates to the integration of geospatial, location services, Building Information Models, and sensors.
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