One post tagged with "Emergency"

A CRITICAL PAIN POINT FOR EMERGENCY CALL SERVICES​

With the advent of the ubiquitous cell phone, the task of the emergency contact centers to prioritize a huge number of calls has become a tough challenge. The kind of challenge that needs to aggregate heterogenous pieces of technology to be addressed efficiently.

In the past, when a damaging event would occur - may it be a car accident, a terrorist attack or a climate disaster - only a limited number of people went to the nearby pharmacy or to the closest phone booth to warn the emergency service. In these times, adequate staffing was not so difficult for emergency contact centers: the call operator capacity was a mere function of the number of incidents.

Now, with so many devices in so many hands, should a mishap take place in a crowded place, you can be sure that everyone will try to reach the emergency contact center at the same time. The operators are then overwhelmed by a large number of simultaneous calls which all convey inefficiently the same pieces of information. Bad luck for the absent-minded woodcutter who left his chain saw inappropriately on at the same time a terrorist attack is taking place: our clumsy woodcutter will not be able to reach any emergency operator.

The situation could be described as an unintended yet effective denial of service attack.

We will show here, how in less than a 3-day period - during a short hackathon - a team of developers, with no prior knowledge of the Wazo programmable platform, was able to put in place an effective solution to this prioritization issue, and save lives.