Technology trends in public safety communications

How will developments such as big data revolutionise public safety communications?

Motorola Solutions’ US-based vice president for smart public safety solutions, Tom Guthrie, was in Australia recently to talk about what the future of public safety operations and performance will look like as new technologies come online. Critical Comms caught up with him to get his views of how those technologies can best be adopted.

CC: What sort of public safety technology trends do you see on the horizon for Australia and New Zealand?

TG: Broadly, the trend is to supplement mission-critical voice communications with mission-critical intelligence. From a technology perspective, that involves sorting out how technical themes such as cloud, crowdsourcing, big data collection/management, data analytics and the Internet of ‘Public Safety’ Things are applied to the workflows and processes of public safety.

Technology innovation is outpacing adoption, so the consumption models are changing as well. There’s a move away from separate products towards solutions integrated with managed services, to which public safety agencies can subscribe. This reduces both cost and complexity for public safety agencies as well as standing up to customer-defined KPIs with supporting tools, including online portals where performance can be monitored.

CC: Much has been said about the ability of big data in public safety to transform daily operations. Where do you see it fitting in?

TG: I think this topic is best understood in the context of key workflows and outcomes in public safety. I’ll give you three examples.

Incident response. When an incident is detected or a 000 call is received from a citizen, intelligence derived from public safety big data analysis can be provided to emergency call takers, dispatchers, first responders and their command staff to increase their situational awareness of the incident. This might be derived from historical records (ie, what’s happened in the past) and real-time video feeds from a variety of sources, as well as social media feeds. If filtered and contextually presented, this ‘picture’ of intelligence can assist in a quicker, safer and more appropriate response to the incident.

Criminal investigations. Rather than having people sort through reams of paper records, data analytics can speed the retrieval of structured information and also provide links among people, places and things that might not be obvious to a detective or investigator. Video analytics can be used to generate structured metadata for very unstructured streams of video, making it easier to search and detect patterns (eg, faces at the scene, counting people, recognising number plates) as well as alert a user to various anomalies - crowding, boundary crossings, traffic accidents and so on.

Predictive/preventive activities. Through data analysis, patterns and trends can be better understood and analytic models can be applied to predict (and hopefully prevent) certain types of crimes by allowing public safety to optimise their resource staffing and positioning.

CC: What new things are Motorola working on to increase capabilities in the public safety sector, and will we seem them applied here in Australia and New Zealand?

TG: We use four tools to assemble our portfolio of smart public safety solutions - some of which we develop in-house. Other key capabilities can be acquired (eg, our recent acquisitions of Emergency CallWorks and PublicEngines). Motorola also has a venture capital fund that we use to invest in new companies/technologies to help them advance their offerings (eg, CyPhy Works SceneDoc, BriefCam). Lastly, we maintain an active ecosystem of partners.

From each of these avenues we assemble solutions that are role- and workflow-specific and targeted to the unique needs of public safety employees. Motorola Solutions has a range of capabilities within its smart public safety portfolio including broadband push to talk, mobile collaboration, on-scene documentation, descriptive and predictive analytics - all of which will be delivered as a service. In Australia, these applications fit under Motorola Solutions’ Next Generation Mobile Intelligence portfolio and we expect to see take-up of these applications grow over the next 12-18 months as more customers determine their operational needs.

CC: Australia is a very different place to the US. Surely one of the biggest challenges you face in introducing this technology here is overcoming social and legislative concerns about privacy. How can you do that?

TG: There are more similarities than differences among various countries. Each is wrestling with the new social issues, balancing the healthy tension between public safety and personal privacy. Laws and regulations in each country vary, but within big data lies intelligence that can be used to keep citizens safe. We focus on providing solutions that are information services, but they are always just one input provided to an officer, commander or dispatcher who makes the final call on how best to use that information. Our intent is to provide each worker the best picture of the situation as possible.

CC: Thinking about where public safety communications technology is headed, what’s your forecast on how the local landscape will look in 10 years’ time?

I see these changes taking place across a set of major themes:

• Data will continue to expand exponentially - 90% of data today has been created in the past two years and those extremely high levels will continue.
• More data/intelligence sharing - crime is not a problem that only occurs locally. I see a much broader sharing of information, best practices, analytics models and so on among public safety officials globally.
• More capabilities will be consumed as a managed service, with less ‘run’ by each individual agency.
• More citizen engagement - citizens are a key part of public safety, so informing and engaging them in public safety, especially through electronic means, will continue.

CC: What do you think about moves around the world to quarantine spectrum for public safety?

TG: Public safety needs reliable and secure communications capacity that is isolated and protected in times of emergency. This can be accomplished in a few different ways, but transporting the public safety traffic on its own frequency spectrum is one of the strongest forms of isolating that traffic.

CC: Is enough being done to secure it?

TG: It’s important to understand that different countries are making different decisions on spectrum allocation based on their ongoing activities. Motorola’s public safety customers would always like to see more done to provide spectrum and a funding mechanism to populate it with their own public safety LTE service. Spectrum is a precious resource but public safety is also an important responsibility.

CC: What happens if, in any particular jurisdiction, not enough mobile broadband spectrum is allocated - what technology can step in to fill the gap?

TG: Beyond spectrum allocation, there are capabilities defined in LTE to support the classification of traffic into multiple levels of quality of service (QoS). This allows for the creation of a virtual private network that can a) segment spectrum use, b) prioritise who gets access to the network and c) give priority to public safety above other forms of traffic. These are some of the things that Motorola is examining in Australia through its alliance with Telstra to jointly develop compelling broadband solutions for public safety.

CC: What do you think of the private network versus commercial carrier models?

TG: Both are valid approaches to the problem of providing public safety with prioritised broadband access. A private network provides the highest degree of separation in a physically separate network, but commercial carrier models also spread the financial burden of building a broad-coverage network while providing prioritised access for public safety users.