TRX Systems Awarded NIST Cooperative Agreement for Demonstration and Testing of NEON® Personnel Tracker with the Arlington County, VA Fire Department

​TRX Systems announced today that it has been awarded funding through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program (PSIAP) to test, validate, and harden the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution to support wide-scale public safety deployment. TRX is partnering with the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD) to conduct extended testing during which the TRX 3D location technology will be used by all personnel at Station 5, serving Pentagon City and Crystal City, to validate usability and performance and to better align the solution with first responder needs.

Through a previous NIST PSIAP award, TRX improved the accuracy and capabilities of its NEON Personnel Tracker solution. With this subsequent Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) award, TRX will take the next steps toward wide-scale deployment by validating and tuning the NEON solution in a challenging live environment. Combined, these projects aim to accelerate the availability of improved 3D location accuracy, easy to use 3D map data tools, and actionable 3D visualizations for first responder use cases.

Over the course of this program, TRX will partner with ACFD to conduct an 8-month field trial that exercises the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a fully operational environment. The key objectives of this extended deployment are to identify and close any gaps that could inhibit widescale deployment, validate usability and tracking accuracy, and demonstrate the operational feasibility and value of the solution.

First responders typically operate in environments that are indoors, underground, or in other areas where access to reliable GPS is impeded. TRX’s NEON Personnel Tracker system delivers reliable and real-time 3D location in these GPS-denied environments by using patented mapping and tracking algorithms that fuse inertial sensor data to compute the user’s path and position. This solution lets on-scene and remote commanders track the real-time location of personnel during an incident, helping them to ensure the safety of their teams and improve the efficiency of their response.

“The ability to locate and track first responders operating indoors under difficult conditions remains a critical capability in the public safety community,” said David Povlitz, Fire Chief, ACFD. “Indoor location data can provide the situational awareness that will help keep first responders safe. In addition, it can increase operational accountability during a response and enable after-action review which can inform our training and improve overall effectiveness at future incidents. These technologies could integrate well with smart communities and neighborhoods.”

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