Public-safety wearables are catching the technological-innovation wave

And now that we have a good understanding how and why development for wearables will accelerate, let’s look at a couple of examples of where this is being put into practice.

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate seeded the market for wearables last year with the commencement of Emerge Accelerator Program and hopes to make an announcement about this year’s program in the second quarter of 2016.

For numerous design concepts integrating wearables into FirstNet may require emulating or even providing “onboard” LTE Evolved Packet Cores (EPC) to support continuous uninterrupted services, even in the event of the loss of a communications link to FirstNet’s EPC.  Additionally, deployed EPCs are envisioned to make up a significant and necessary component of a MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) or mesh-network solution.   Demonstrating the capabilities of new hardware platforms to meet this need, Core Network Dynamics has put an LTE Evolved Packet Core on a RaspberryPi as part of a larger project they call OpenEPC.

At IBM, Dr. Asaf Adi—a senior manager for IoT and wearables at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel—is leading a team working on the

“Our new wearables platform serves as a real-time warning system. It analyzes a vast amount of information gathered from wearable sensors embedded in personal protective equipment, such as smart safety helmets and protective vests, and in the workers’ individual smartphones. These sensors can continuously monitor a worker’s pulse rate, movement, body temperature, and hydration level, as well as environmental factors—such as noise level—and other parameters.”

Dr. Adi, also adds that employee privacy needs to be an integral part in the design of such systems; otherwise, they may not be widely accepted.

Beyond prototyping, one question is: How do you make such devices intrinsically safe, so they are suitable to the demands of the public-safety community? In a recent press release, the Department of Homeland Security First Responder Group (FRG) announced that it as been working with partners like the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and a team of global technology performers over the last six months on open standards, so sensors can provide immediately identifiable, accessible, interoperable and useful information across all first-responder teams.