Update from WPI Personnel Tracking Conference - Day 2
Posted on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
by Carol Politi
Day 2 of the WPI Personnel Tracking Conference profiled more interesting technology development and launched the start of a standards development process for personnel tracking technology.
Francine Amon (Leader/Firefighting Technology Group, NIST), Larry Konsin (Working Group Chair, NFPA 1801), and Bruce Varner (Fire Chief, Santa Rosa Fire Department/NFPA Technical Committee Chair) all discussed efforts ongoing to establish standards for tracking systems (new) and electronic safety equipment. A working session on standards development led by Francine Amon established a steering committee for the development of personnel tracking technologies.
Bruce Varner delivered the perspective of the firefighter, incident commander, and fire chief regarding tracking system requirements:
- Firefighter: transparent to individual, automatically on, very accurate
- Incident Commander: must operate in background until needed, 3M or better accuracy, alerts upon crew separation of more than 10 ft, lack of motion, distress alarm, sudden increase in heat conditions
- Fire Chief: very accurate, low cost, low maintenance, and unlimited lifetime warranty!
One of the big takeaways in general from the day is how much interest there is across DHS, DOD, and law enforcement, and firefighters in GPS-denied location - and how common the baseline requirements are for this technology. Specific concepts of operations differ - and these differences will drive variations in system implementations - but the common thread is the need for systems that rely on navigation to function when inside or otherwise not in areas of GPS coverage. DARPA (Dr. Stefanie Tompkins) specifically pointed out that many systems are being built with the critical assumption that they will have location or localization (with the implication being where this is not available these systems will not be able to function.) Stefanie also pointed out that it is not cost effective to build a custom navigation system for every single problem - an extensible and modular system is required.
A working group of user community representatives also got together to review progress and discuss requirements. Firefighters, law enforcement, DHS, and industry personnel discussed progress, system requirements, and whether requirements should be updated to reflect progress and increased knowledge base within both the user and vendor community over the past two years. This group felt that a steering committee of firefighters from different regions would be useful in helping to ensure developers received solid and balanced feedback (across metro, suburban, and rural areas with different funding levels and organizational resources). The standards group recommended that the user community be part of its steering committee so the output from these two working groups was well correlated.
Additional perspective on the conference has been posted on firefighterclosecalls.com here.