Rave Mobile Safety releases Smart911 update that eases the creation of building profiles

Rave Mobile Safety recently released Smart911 4.0, the latest update of its safety software that features Smart911 Facility, which lets building owners, managers and/or city inspectors input detailed building information in a profile that can be accessed by 911 call-takers during an emergency.

Smart911 has long served as a platform that contains profile information about individuals that is based on the phone number associated with the device that is used to contact a 911 public-safety answering point (PSAP). With Smart911 Facility, building information can be housed in a PSAP’s database and accessed by emergency call-takers when the emergency caller’s location is determined, according to Todd Piett, chief product officer for Rave Mobile Safety.

“Through our integration with the 911 system, we see the location of every call that comes through a center, and we bounce it against these GIS-bounded files of buildings that we know about and then pop up the information based on that,” Piett said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

Having updated facility information can be critical to first responders as they try to find an emergency caller, particularly one who may not be very familiar with his/her at the time, Piett said. With Smart911 Facility in Smart911 4.0, information can be housed that include floor plans, a list of entrance points and details about where potential hazardous materials or key infrastructure are located, he said.

“Where are the walls in this building? Where are the entrances? Where are the AEDs?” Piett said. “We feel that the need to collect all of that information—all of the intelligence that is associated with a specific dot on a map—is a key component, and that’s what we’re aiming at with Smart911 Facility. We’re going to provide our agencies with a really scalable way to collect all of that information.

“So, when they know that the caller is on the third floor, they also know that the entrances to this building are on this side and … and, by the way, at the end of the hall is where they store all of the paints. That’s the kind of information that’s really going to make the location data into actionable intelligence.”

And the chances of that information being accurate should increase considerably with Smart911 Facility, because the platform lets building owners and managers add relevant information, instead of depending solely on resource-strapped city inspection departments. When new information about a facility is added, building inspectors or fire inspectors only need to verify it.

“What this allows the public-safety agencies to do is to go out to their communities and say, ‘We want you to put in this information—floor plans, AEDs, emergency-response information, key holders, hazmat materials,’” Piett said. “All of this rich data is going to be managed by you in the same way that Smart911 is—we’ve got a series of reminders and processes for aging that data out. There are administrators for those accounts, and there’s an approval process by the public-safety agency to verify it.

“That’s all managed through our system, so that now public-safety agencies are not working with either no—or or out-of-date—data, because they can’t scalably manage all of the different sources that are out there.”