Complex emergency management is fundamentally a lesson in organized chaos where accountability is a core foundational element of shared situational awareness. Knowing where to find what you need can be as chaotic given that response assets — the vehicles, equipment, autonomous platforms — are rarely in one place and scattered throughout an area of operation. Asset inventory coupled with resources and capability on a "single...
Read More
Battlefield, disaster response, and public safety sustainment is both an art and science; it’s about synchronizing, integrating, and transporting commodities in a highly “just-in-time” manner to provide maneuver and incident commanders with freedom of action, extended operational reach, and prolonged endurance. As it turns out, the “science” of sustainment is not terribly difficult as it is grounded in basic math and computation, based on real-time...
Read More
For decades now, public safety Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems have provided a reliable, albeit geographically limited, communications backbone and baseline for related command and control systems for public safety agencies. These legacy LMR systems are often limited to the geographic areas of the agency/agencies being served and, in many cases, there may be multiple public safety LMR systems in the same geographic area using...
Read More
The intelligence community has been warning for some time about “home made” explosive and chemical weapons, many of which can be fashioned from materials bought at Home Depot or the local pool supply store. Fast forward to Saturday March 14, 2015 when leaders in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq provided the Reuters news organization with soil and clothing samples taken by the peshmerga from...
Read More
Much like military conflict, manmade and natural disasters present similar challenges of uncertainty, complexity and variability. These time-constrained and chaotic decision environments require rapid adaptation and an ability to pivot quickly to changes in the environment. The complexity of the event, coupled with time compressed decision space and the severity of the potential consequences, creates conditions that are unforgiving of error. Given the austere and...
Read More
The relationship between weather and emergency management (not to mention emergency preparedness) is fundamental and can be quite complicated. Weather causes many of the disasters that require an emergency response, yet awareness of conditions is essential for management of incidents unrelated to weather as the cause. For sure, meteorological awareness can have a profound effect managing the extent of destruction to life and property to...
Read More
Crisis negotiation and de-escalation are law enforcement techniques used to communicate with people who are threatening violence (workplace violence, domestic violence, suicide, or terrorism) and can include barricaded subjects, stalkers, criminals attempting to escape after a botched robbery, and hostage-takers. While basic voice communications are of extreme value, understanding what is going on when the negotiator and subject are not on the phone enables better...
Read More
BlueforceTACTICAL was the first product in the world to deliver extensible, secure, and scalable body worn sensor fusion. Combined with location services, AI to the edge, PTT, live streaming video, plus unparallel extensibility, our patented edge compute application platform has proven to be the ultimate adaptive "Swiss Army Knife" for mission critical operations where situational awareness is more than just a dot on a map. While...
Read More
While cloud-based analytics and AI services can provide high-value recognitional services across imagery and data, too often data communications back to the cloud are jittery and quite often denied due to the crush of requests related to the incident, hampering access. Moving recognitional and computation services to the edge ensures access, but also delivers an ultra-low latency solution in time constrained environments. BlueforceEDGE is our autonomous...
Read More
There is a place in the world for the “big red button” hardware solutions and that is for medical emergencies, particularly for the elderly. The big red button hanging around one’s neck is an easy target to hit in a medical emergency, but most emergency situations require clarity in the nature of the issue so that the appropriate responders are dispatched. For example, teachers in...
Read More
It is most assuredly not our parent's world. We suddenly find ourselves in a new world where the pandemic and serious spikes in crime have implications to our critical infrastructure, our schools, our businesses, and our people. Cybersecurity remains a concern, but physical security in our personal and professional lives is now front and center. Recent attacks and attempted attacks internationally present a diverse and...
Read More
Our nation’s stadiums, arenas, and concert venues host millions of people each year for special events. The majority of these venues will not contend with an extreme emergency during any given year. However, as we have seen in Las Vegas and more recently in Houston, consequences of extreme activity at these events, whether caused by human violence, natural disaster or another factor can be devastating...
Read More