Public-safety wearables are catching the technological-innovation wave

For wearables to be practical, communications links are critical, and we are also seeing developments in this area, as well. A recent article in IWCE’s Urgent Communications details how Mutualink and Intel teamed to provide a wearable public-safety gateway with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity.

"With the wearable smart gateway, myriad devices—from biometric sensors to body-worn cameras—can be connected via wire, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi with a paired public-safety user at the lightweight device,” according to Mike Wengrovitz, Mutualink’s vice president of innovation.

Mutualink has connected the Wearable Smart Gateway to multiple live Band14 FirstNet systems, demonstrating the secure sharing of real-time bodycam video, biologic information, outdoor and indoor location information, to the command post and recently received an Innovation Award from IJIS for its field demonstration at Urban Shield 2015.

Mutualink’s gateway is based on Intel’s Edison Compute module, which is available for less than $50 dollars per unit. For those of you who are thinking about your own project: a good place to start with the Edison is an integrated Arduino breakout board, which can be used to prototype your designs and develop different sensor integrations prior to designing a more compact solution.

With all that is happening with wearables, IWCE next month will inaugurate the Wearable Showcase, right next to the Applications Showcase at the show in Las Vegas.  I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

Edmond ‘Ed’ Vea is a consultant to government and industry, focusing on FirstNet, mission-critical networks, and wearables for Public Safety Applications. Vea has more than 20 years experience designing, building, testing, optimizing and operating wireless communications systems using technologies such as GSM, CDMA, P25, TETRA, 802.11, 802,16, 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE.  

You can reach out to Ed on his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmondvea