With increased personal mobility, it becomes more and more difficult to ensure that enough crew are within reach. Organisations working with volunteer and part-time crews need to ensure that enough first responders are close by to cover potential in- cidents. At the same time, it is very important to respect the privacy of crew members. A solution should therefore not rely on the transmission of their locations. Geo-Availability respects privacy but makes it possible to take suitable action in case that too few crew members are close by.
No transmission of position data
Geo-Availability is based on the RES.Q terminal checking whether it is inside or outside a pre-de- fined area. On start-up, and on crossing the ar- ea-boundary, the device will return a payload (here called Availability) with ACK-ID 0x4A = Leaving / Left Area or ACK-ID 0x4B = Entering / Entered Area. The payload might contain additional information,
e.g. SerialNumber, Date&Time, Availability-Profiles and battery state. The position of the end-user is never transmitted! Furthermore, the user always has the possibility to disable GPS altogether.
Geo-Alerting
Geo-availability information can be taken into ac- count in planning a deployment. In this way, the device can enable emergency response forces to
be alerted in a targeted and timely manner. The required number of emergency response person- nel and specialists can thus be deployed. If more personnel are required, re-alerting can take place immediately in a targeted manner, without the nui- sance of over-alerting. This makes it possible to manage responders much more efficiently and to reduce the cost of financial compensation for vol- unteers or their employers. In addition, employers’ willingness to release their staff for voluntary work in the fire brigade will not be undermined by un- necessary call-outs.