![]() It could also keep responders safe themselves. Locating emergency callers accurately in high-rise buildings is vital, says Kevin Kupietz, who teaches industrial safety and emergency management at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Having multiple options is a good thing, however. Li and his colleagues have developed a system that estimates floor location using Wi-Fi signals. In 91 per cent of the tests, the system was accurate to within two floors.īinghao Li at the University of New South Wales in Sydney thinks the new approach is interesting, but says the pair exaggerate how much of an improvement over existing systems it is. This meant that anyone in a building where data hadn’t previously been collected could also be located, provided the type of building was known.įalcon tested the app by visiting 63 random floors at five New York buildings, including the Rockefeller Center. The pair also used plans of 1100 New York buildings to work out the average distances between floors in residential blocks versus office blocks. Movement data was clustered at certain altitudes, revealing distinct floors. To solve this problem, Falcon and Schulzrinne tracked volunteers who repeatedly visited different floors of certain buildings. This gives the altitude, but that doesn’t translate directly to floor number because the distance between floors can significantly vary from building to building. But what floor? Many smartphones, including all iPhones released since 2014, can now detect their elevation above sea level. “The GPS coupled with the strength signal of your phone gives a strong indication of whether you’re indoors or outdoors,” says Falcon. The first step is to detect when someone is inside a building. Sensory is available online but the pair hope the system might be integrated into future smartphones. By combining GPS, signal strength and atmospheric pressure – using the barometer that many smartphones now contain – the pair created an app called Sensory that could identify how high up a caller was. Now William Falcon and Henning Schulzrinne at Columbia University in New York have come up with a way to use a smartphone’s sensors to pinpoint not only where in a building a caller is located, but the floor as well. Some callers don’t feel it is safe to speak at all, simply calling 999 or 911 in silence. ![]() But sometimes those seeking help are too panicked to speak clearly or don’t know where they are. Knowing the location of an emergency caller can be a matter of life and death. ![]()
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