Honeywell invests in RapidSOS, hopes to accelerate initial stage of response process

Honeywell announced a strategic investment in RapidSOS, as well as plans to accelerate response efforts by integrating Honeywell sensor technology—particularly in-building fire systems—into the RapidSOS platform that delivers critical data to most 911 centers.

Sameer Agrawal, Honeywell’s general manager for software and services, said the RapidSOS agreement complements Honeywell’s purchase of US Digital Designs (USDD) last month as part of a company initiative to streamline the delivery of key building information to firefighters and other responders during emergencies.

“We create alarms in our core business—we detect problems in the building, generate alarms, and then we ship the alarms out, so they can be responded to,” Agrawal said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The USDD portion was at the very end of that alarm journey, which allowed the firefighters to get [the dispatch information]. RapidSOS sits in the middle.

“Our plan is to take the data that’s been generated by the building and get it into the hands of the firefighters, without having to worry about someone calling it in, typing it in and making mistakes through different handoffs. So, the first time that they’re looking at what’s going on in a [building’s fire-system] panel is not when they show up. When they get into the truck, they’re able to monitor that. That’s the basic concept here, because we want to be able to cut down that time that it takes [to begin executing a response effort] … by roughly in half.”

RapidSOS CEO Michael Martin said the recent deadly fires in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore underscored the need to accelerate the fire-response process.

“[News of those fires] just really hit home for our team,” Martin said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Every one of these buildings should immediately alert the fire department in an emergency. Today, the infrastructure often doesn’t allow that.

“That’s the goal here: Link the billions of devices and sensors that Honeywell powers to our emergency-response data platform, organize the data, structure the data, and present it in a way that is useful to 911 and first responders, so they can drive the fastest, most effective response possible.”

No product implementations leveraging the capabilities of Honeywell and RapidSOS were identified, but Martin said such an announcement is expected within the next couple of months.

Martin is confident that an effective, streamlined integration of the technologies that RapidSOS and Honeywell have developed can help save lives and property.

“We all know that minutes and seconds matter,” Martin said. “We all know the stat that a fire doubles in size every 30 seconds when it’s in the middle of flashover, so time really matters in certain types of emergencies. Certainly, a multitenant-structure fire is one of those.”

Agrawal described the current communications flow when an emergency occurs within a building.

“The sensor in the building—a small detector—talks to a [building system] panel that is on its own proprietary network,” Agrawal said. “That’s typically how commercial buildings work, and that’s that has been the case for ages and ages.

“The panel then decides, ‘This is really a problem that someone needs to look at.’ Today, that information then gets communicated out to the central station, who has to wait for that information to come up and then pick up the phone to call the dispatch center and talk to them about all of these things—rehash all of the information they can share. And then the dispatch center does the same thing—types it in and gets on the radio, doing the same thing that central station did.”

Honeywell hopes that its work with RapidSOS and other partners will augment this process by creating an path for digital information from building sensors to be shared automatically with first responders, Agrawal said.

“What we are going to do is that we’ll let that [traditional information] flow continue on, because that’s the regulation and that’s how people have done it,” Agrawal said. “But we’re providing a secondary path of that information flow to happen all digitally.

“Think of it as a redundant path that we will add on top of the existing infrastructure. And based upon where we have connection points, that information will flow from the panel all the way to the first responders’ mobile app.”

Honeywell officials began pursuing this initiative to accelerate this information flow after realizing that responders typically did not have data about the status of a building until arriving at the scene of an emergency. Agrawal stressed that Honeywell’s goal is to compress the time needed to get responders critical information, not rush their operations on site.

“I want to clarify that it’s not the response time that I’m saving,” Agrawal said. “It’s all of the communications time to get to the responders to [enable a response], which was a mind-boggling piece for us. We give so little time for the responders to do actual stuff when they show up, but we give all of this time in between.”

Martin said that RapidSOS already supports automated data flows to more than 5,200 911 centers from smartphones, wearables, home-security systems and connected cars. The notion of adding Honeywell’s base of sensors in commercial buildings—supporting more than 10 million building worldwide, including 5.2 million in the U.S.—is a big step for RapidSOS pursuing its mission to “harness data to help people in the moments that matter most,” he said.

“As we think about the ability to drive that mission, one of these last major areas where emergencies are occurring is obviously inside buildings and inside the built environment,” Martin said. “Having Honeywell’s footprint there with 10 million of those buildings streaming data into the [RapidSOS] platform, I think is a massive leap for us for that segment of the market.

“This was a last major piece for us to fill in—in terms of a part of the world where emergencies occur—where we didn’t have ubiquitous sensor coverage in our platform yet. So, this was a really big one for us.”

Martin said that officials from Honeywell and RapidSOS have been discussing a potential partnership for “probably over a year.” RapidSOS is a private company, and terms of the agreement were not disclosed publicly.