There is a huge utility to DHS of such a 3D locator system. There are over 2 million emergency responders (ERs) in the US with the mission to save lives, while staying alive themselves. Emerging technologies are critical for meeting the U.S. Fire Administration’s goal: reduce firefighter fatalities by 25% in the next five years. Existing technology allows first responders to monitor their own safety, e.g., Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) and Heads-Up-Display (HUD) units, and to send and receive messages from incident command (IC), however reoccurring failures and user error have led to fatalities. A lack of status, condition, location, task, resource, threat, and exit accessibility information, or inability to convey this information among emergency responders (ERs), Strike Teams, and Incident Command (IC) can result in civilian and responder casualties.

The following are some of the required performance measures for this locator system:

• Locator must send information including location-related information
• Locator must wirelessly transmit inside or outside of structures and through rubble to an off-site incident command post, on-site incident command posts, emergency responders, and/or other authorized parties including within teams of responders.
• Locator must be self-initializing, self-calibrating, self-adjusting and must have selfdiagnostic capabilities to ensure speed and reliability.
• Locator must operate outside all buildings and inside of almost all buildings, no matter their structural state and environmental conditions.
• Primary incident command posts should be able to monitor the status of the locator and its host from a radial distance from 30 meters to 100 meters (per relay).
• Locator must be able to specify the location of its host in three dimensions within 6 meters (3 meters desired).
• The base station software must be able to display location and identification of personnel.
• The base station must be able to display general-to-specific information (the ability to drill down from an overall scene to a specific individual) about an operation/incident and its emergency responder participants.
• The base station must include visualization tools that:
• Allow incident commanders and site personnel to easily interpret incoming displayed information.
• Display the location of an emergency responder in easy to understand coordinates. (One form of display must be a wire-frame like view of the building structure with the position of each responder indicated. The wire-frame view must include a scale showing grid spaces of approximately 10 feet in every direction.)
• Allow the user to identify, group, and categorize responders as desired

Optionally, the coordinates returned by the locator can be input to a Geographic Information System (GIS) system (including a building map or equivalent for underground structures).

EXAMPLE 2: CELL PHONE BASED POSITIONING INSIDE BUILDINGS
Mobile networks (GSM, GPRS, UTMS, CDMA) are available everywhere but the positioning accuracy is rather low. By calculating the signal’s time and distance to nearby cell-phone towers, mobile networks can calculate a position, but the accuracy is rather low (50-300 mts). This means that the position of calls from mobile phones located in a multi-story building provide information that will at best identify a few buildings or the block from which the call originated. It’s also possible that a mobile phone (if it’s on the top floors of a tall building) can be connected to a transmitter in a neighboring cell, causing the accuracy to go down to kilometers. Calls from mobile phones in multistory buildings provide information that will identify a few buildings or the block that the call originated.

Solutions to increase the accuracy of mobile networks already exist in the USA, in which mobile clients are located with the help of supplementary information (e.g., postal-code information, streets, town names, etc.). Accuracy is further improved by using the time taken by the signal to reach the mobile device. But due to lack of directional information, users can be located anywhere in a circular band (or a section of a circular band) around a base station, so uncertainty remains.

It’s important to solve indoor positioning problems, because by 2005 there will be 184 million U.S. wireless subscribers (Jupiter Research, 2001). Moreover, according to the National Emergency Number Association, more than 30 percent of 911 calls in the US originate from mobile phones—a number expected to soon outpace 911 wireline calls.

A multitude of applications and services would benefit from indoor positioning and navigation. Technologies such as GPS and initiatives such as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s E-911 mandate generated a lot of interest in location-based services (LBSs). However, despite GPS technology and the positioning capabilities of cellular networks, millions of square meters of indoor space (i.e., office buildings, airports, convention centers, etc.) are out of reach.