A Responder's Critical Path

A Responder's Critical Path


We’ve all come to rely on the navigation apps on our mobile devices to steer our daily itineraries. Within seconds of typing our destination into a blinking search bar, we have an expertly planned route and estimated time of arrival. These apps are incredibly accurate, usually predicting your travel time within a few minutes of accuracy. For our nation’s first responders, however, those few minutes could mean the difference between resuscitating someone from a heart attack and getting there too late. In the public safety world, minutes, even seconds, can mean all the difference. NIST Public Safety Communications Research Division’s funded project from Southern Methodist University aims to create a tailored-to-public safety navigational platform to support the efficient and safe dispatch of personnel for emergency response. This project intends to surpass capabilities of typical navigation apps by seeking to predict impediments to emergency response like weather, floods, traffic patterns, and response resource availability.


The Problem


Fire trucks are not very similar to a typical civilian vehicle, so applications like Google Maps and Waze that have become accessible and reliable to everyday Americans fall short in meeting the needs of first responders. First and foremost, emergency vehicles are significantly larger and harder to steer when compared to a regular car. As such, they often cannot be driven on certain winding or narrow roads. Another risky maneuver for large trucks is left turns, which can increase the risk of traffic accidents. The researchers working on the SAFE-NET project saw an opportunity to modify existing navigation algorithm systems to meet the specialized routing needs of public safety. 


Dr. Khaled Abdelghany, the principal investigator on this project, explains the overall ..

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