Lost & Lucky Labs

Situational Awareness is paramount during an emergency situation. It helps to provide safety to the first responders who are selflessly providing safety to others. Currently this situational awareness comes at the cost reduced cognitive capacity due to the need to manually communicate and track each person’s location. First responders are forced to resort to rudimentary tactics to achieve this situational awareness. Locations are often verbally communicated and tracked manually on white boards or paper. This not only takes focus away from the dangerous task at hand, but is also prone to error in the chaotic nature of an emergency situation. This proposal aims to create a solution to address the need for tracking first responders during an emergency response. Specifically, it presents an ad-hoc network of ultra-wideband (UWB) devices to ascertain the location of each first responder and communicate that information back to a centralized command center monitored by an onsite director. From there, the onsite director can help navigate first responders away from dangerous areas, locate an incapacitated team member, or even ensure that all personnel have been evacuated at the conclusion of the response. UWB uses short pulse sequences, called burst pulse modulation, to transmit data as opposed amplitude or frequency modulation used in most RF applications. Due to this mechanism, communication is not restricted to any particular radio frequency, allowing it to operate over a wide band (which is where the name is derived from). Timing between UWB pulses is exceptionally small (2 nanoseconds) and benefit from very clean “edges,” allowing for precise determination of a signal’s arrival. Using these high precision timestamps and the known speed of light, relative distances between objects can be very accurately calculated. Utilizing ultra-wideband technology creates the potential for a system that can track a first responder within 10 centimeters. As with many technology development projects, we have more unknowns than knowns when we start. It is not until we actually begin experimenting and building the technology that we understand what truly provides the most value to the mission. For this reason, this system will be created utilizing Agile methodologies for an incremental and modular approach. The team will create a backlog of potential work to be completed for each milestone, broken up into outcome oriented units called “user stories.”  These user stories are prioritized from highest to lowest in terms of the amount of potential value they contribute towards the end product.  The high priority user stories reside at the top of the backlog and consist of small digestible pieces of work that will be performed in the near term.  As you move down the backlog, the user stories become larger and more general, as they are more likely to change as we make new discoveries while building out the solution. This agile implementation will also include iterative prototyping of the final design. By doing so, the team will be able to solicit regular feedback from the first responder community after providing hands on demos. This will help to ensure that the product developed actually meets the needs of the on-site emergency responders.

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Description

Situational Awareness is paramount during an emergency situation. It helps to provide safety to the first responders who are selflessly providing safety to others. Currently this situational awareness comes at the cost reduced cognitive capacity due to the need to manually communicate and track each person’s location. First responders are forced to resort to rudimentary tactics to achieve this situational awareness. Locations are often verbally communicated and tracked manually on white boards or paper. This not only takes focus away from the dangerous task at hand, but is also prone to error in the chaotic nature of an emergency situation.

This proposal aims to create a solution to address the need for tracking first responders during an emergency response. Specifically, it presents an ad-hoc network of ultra-wideband (UWB) devices to ascertain the location of each first responder and communicate that information back to a centralized command center monitored by an onsite director. From there, the onsite director can help navigate first responders away from dangerous areas, locate an incapacitated team member, or even ensure that all personnel have been evacuated at the conclusion of the response.

UWB uses short pulse sequences, called burst pulse modulation, to transmit data as opposed amplitude or frequency modulation used in most RF applications. Due to this mechanism, communication is not restricted to any particular radio frequency, allowing it to operate over a wide band (which is where the name is derived from). Timing between UWB pulses is exceptionally small (2 nanoseconds) and benefit from very clean “edges,” allowing for precise determination of a signal’s arrival. Using these high precision timestamps and the known speed of light, relative distances between objects can be very accurately calculated.
Utilizing ultra-wideband technology creates the potential for a system that can track a first responder within 10 centimeters.

As with many technology development projects, we have more unknowns than knowns when we start. It is not until we actually begin experimenting and building the technology that we understand what truly provides the most value to the mission. For this reason, this system will be created utilizing Agile methodologies for an incremental and modular approach.

The team will create a backlog of potential work to be completed for each milestone, broken up into outcome oriented units called “user stories.”  These user stories are prioritized from highest to lowest in terms of the amount of potential value they contribute towards the end product.  The high priority user stories reside at the top of the backlog and consist of small digestible pieces of work that will be performed in the near term.  As you move down the backlog, the user stories become larger and more general, as they are more likely to change as we make new discoveries while building out the solution.

This agile implementation will also include iterative prototyping of the final design. By doing so, the team will be able to solicit regular feedback from the first responder community after providing hands on demos. This will help to ensure that the product developed actually meets the needs of the on-site emergency responders.