UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics Department demonstrated their first responder smartphone application to the Lincoln County first responders in March.
The demonstration was part of the Chancellor’s Outreach Program.
The application, called the Effective Emergency Response Communication (EERC), was funded by the National Institute of Justice.
After working on the application for five years, it was completed in October 2012.
Dr. William Ribarsky, Computer Science Department chair, is the principle investigator for the project.
Dr. Kalpathi Subramanian, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, is a co-investigator for the project.
“It is not very unusual to work on such long projects because most research grants tend to be three years long,” he said.
Subramanian went on to say that the research grant was renewed to extend the project.
The application gives first responders a floor plan of the building in which the emergency is occurring. This allows the command center outside of the building to see a 3-D view of the building and see the location of each responder. Also the application allows the command center to send visual directions to the first responders so that they can locate the target and victims inside the building.
Jack Guest, a research associate on the project, says, “Some of the chief’s [UNC Charlotte Police Chief Jeff Baker] major feedback is how if he is outside the building and he has his guys inside, and he has a 3-D picture of the building in front of him then no matter how many times he has been in the building it still will assist him in knowing where his people are. We have to take the drawings for a building…and build a 3-D representation of the building on the computer.”
Subramanian says that while there are many buildings in a city they can prioritize which buildings are built into the application. These buildings, for example, would be schools or other high-risk areas.
The team working on the EERC has done many test runs of the application on campus. They preformed demonstrations in Woodward Hall in November 2011 and J. Murray Atkins library in July 2012. The most recent demonstration took place in Lincoln County in March.
“We have had several students work on the project over the past five years. Long story short, it is the students who are doing all of the newest technologies and they get trained in that and they are better for it. We do run a lot of recruiting type of events to bring students in through many programs to see what the opportunities in the college are. If there are some very bright students, they should be talking to the faculty members in charge of the projects. That is what most of the faculty here are looking for, are bright students who can get involved in these types of projects,” said Subramanian.
“There is a misconception among students that funding stops students from furthering their education. Even for undergraduates, we have small scholarships that bright students can compete for. At this point the application has just been built so we haven’t even thought about licensing it. For one thing, this is a publically funded project, so our goal is not to commercialize it at this point. At least especially for police departments.”