The Evolving Technology of Emergency Response Systems

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, people swarmed around radios to catch every detail for hours into the night. When the twin towers fell in New York City on 9-11, more people knew about what happened or literally watched it occur via television than through any other medium within minutes of the first plane hitting. Some 17+ years later, we know instantly there is something wrong through multiple digital connections that we practically carry in our pockets wherever we happen to be. Our technology shift is moving from hours to minutes to moments in how fast emergency response noticing occurs today.

Moving Forward as the Pieces Fit

The technological advance didn’t happen in a moment, however. It took decades for the right pieces to fall into place for big leaps to occur. A key factor in recent years has been the provisioning and layout of infrastructure to provide telecommunications broadband speed, even on mobile devices. In some cases, things needed to wait for critical components to become affordable. In others, regulation needed to be cleared. As the right pieces fell into the right places, technology capability launched forward. A key part was the ability to move and share real-time data quickly, especially in a visual format such as a map platform. This opening of the geospatial information system door, or GIS, revolutionized emergency response data sharing even more.

Evolving the Internet

The second key component involved Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP. The Internet uses an assortment of protocols to manage data transmission and behavior, and SIP became the bulwark by which NG9-1-1 became available as an Emergency Services IP Network resource. This advancement continues to expand and evolve, increasing the digital infrastructure between emergency agencies as well as their sharing of usable data, providing aggregated benefits to all involved.

Bringing Emergency Calls Into the Future

For years, the 9-1-1 system has used a very basic design far more for reaction function than proactive benefits. For the most part, a user had to initiate a phone call, and a small amount of basic identification information is transferred with it, but not much more. The Next Generation 9-1-1 technology dramatically improves information transfer, allowing everything from video to voice to text information to move at light speed via Internet connections. With the benefit of an existing digital network and fiber-optic channels, massive amounts of data can move, dramatically expanding the ability of responding agencies to share information quickly, completely and accurately. This in turn increases response capability and targets the effort far better than the guessing game that would frequently occur with a basic 9-1-1 call. It also provides excellent capture of statistics and historical data for study and overall emergency response improvement based on the same archives.

Seeing Technology Locally

For communities in Montgomery County, advancing emergency response technology is realized locally through the Montgomery County Emergency Communication District (MCECD) who provides support and operation of the current 9-1-1 system within Montgomery County, Texas. The MCECD agency is pushing for both local alerts and robust emergency notification via a modern 9-1-1 system. Residents can always find out more at www.mc911.org .