BlueforceTACTICAL Companion App for Samsung GEAR S3

Blueforce, like most companies, works to attract a Board of Advisors. These are folks that have served in tactical and leadership positions in the markets we want to pursue. One of our most important mentors was a former Marine who was a senior executive in Donald Rumsfeld’s (SecDef) Pentagon. He insisted that for Blueforce to really understand the challenges, we had to “spend a week in the breach”.

He took us into the field to work alongside of guys who did tagger, tracker, locator tasks in the IC. He took us to Baghdad in the Fall of 2003 to live and work in a multi-domain environment called the Coalition Provisional Authority to drive information sharing architectures that considered non-traditional partners. He took us to border environments where human trafficking was a big problem, but so was CBRN/WMD. Blueforce was leveraged to integrate and monitor it all.

Things we have learned by spending a “week in the breach” have shaped the way we deliver software products and have included:

  1. Operators have a primary focus: and that is accomplishing the mission, and that includes persistent eyes on target . New tech is secondary.
  2. Any notifications to the operator need to be exception based so as not to distract from the core mission.
  3. Information interrupts should be tunable by the operator.
  4. Flooding the decision maker with massive amounts of non-relevant data is not an option.
  5. A common operating picture must be relevant to the human sitting in front of it.

The one we have heard across every national security and public safety market segment is #1, above. Taking eyes off the target to pull out a smartphone is not always an option. When we looked at this, it became clear that wearables could change the game and serve as an alternate user interface for tactical situational awareness. Wearables like the Samsung GEAR S3.

Blueforce is proud to announce general availability of the BlueforceTACTICAL Companion App for the Samsung GEAR S3. When used with BlueforceTACTICAL running on your Android smart phone, the Samsung GEAR S3 can share the heartrate of the operator, but also receive highly personalized and data driven notifications from the BlueforceTACTICAL software running on the smartphone. A sampling of notifications and interactions sent to the watch includes:

  • Receipt of AI and cognitive services hits
  • Receipt and acceptance of subscription requests
  • Receipt of chat messages
  • Receipt of hyperlocal notifications
  • Receipt and acknowledgement of EVAC and ROLL CALL requests
  • Receipt and acknowledgement of PANIC, alarms, and warnings from body worn sensors or from others you are working with.

The product is available on Samsung smartphones with support for other phones coming in August 2018.  For more information or a demonstration, call us at 866-960-0204 or send an email to info@blueforcedev.com.