Alarm system to the rescue

THE EDITOR: This is an open letter to Prime Minister Dr Rowley.

It is with a sense of sadness and even helplessness that we experience the death of another of our young women, due to our inability to employ systems that aid in their protection. We cannot allocate full-time personal bodyguards to our women, nor can we restrict their movements even if it is for their safety. There is a call to give them some non-lethal weaponry so they can protect themselves but we demur and some of them die.

Still, when they are attacked or even find themselves in life-threatening situations, they may bawl for help. But many times help is too far away to hear their cries of distress. Yet the technology is there to amplify their cries, to bring their distress immediately to the ears of those who can help; only if we have the cultural confidence, as PM Mia Mottley in Barbados would say, to take the lead in creating and implementing systems of technology and responders that surround and protect any of us who bawls for help.

The mobile and internet technologies should cover the whole of our two islands by contract and even some distance from our shores into the sea. The relevant providers/manufacturers tell us that by the push of a button we can initiate two-way voice and even video communications with anyone locally or abroad, transfer real-time information on our location to those that are listening, to those who in emergencies can come to our aid. The technologies are available, but the listening and response systems, our people systems, our community systems, are not looking within ourselves for solutions.

Our company, Ixanos Ltd, for some years now has developed the technology product, ResQ, that combines a smart phone with Bluetooth buttons and wearables (watch, brooch, pendant, etc), such that if any of them were triggered, the potential victim is in immediate contact with a first responder (community police, security company or whomsoever) via two-way voice, video, location (via GPS). If the phone were snatched away, though locked, it keeps on sending information. However, the wearable device takes over and continues to send at least location information of the victim.

Our system was tested locally and regionally with the collaboration of Massy/G4S and UWI. Indeed, a live location of a TT student was accomplished in Jamaica when such an alarm call was triggered, picked up in Trinidad and information forwarded to the Jamaican police. In recognition that some of the alarms could result in court proceedings, all communications (voice, video, GPS) are recorded and stored in the Cloud since it may be needed as evidence.

The system has been presented to prospective clients including the police, some security companies, large organisations, closed housing communities. At best their responses were perfunctory – according to Peter Minshall, is it that we are full of self-contempt when we are called upon to lead, to innovate, be first?

We talk about community policing, which is a strategy of policing that focuses on developing relationships with the community; a philosophy of full service policing that is highly personal, where normally an officer patrols the same area for a period of time and develops a relationship with the citizens to identify and solve problems.

To us this relationship included to protect and serve, to be the first responders to the call of any of the community. Hence each TTPS community policing unit should be a monitoring station that listens 365/24/7 to the cries, the bawling, of any of its charges. Still the existing technologies allow all of the monitoring stations to be connected via the internet to the TTPS command centre and each other and as such allows the response of any cry for help via location to be directed appropriately.

Further, it is easy to see that such a personal alarm system, though the intent of this letter is about crime, has other applications. For example for older people living alone it gives them a channel via which they can immediately call for help if they were to fall ill or have an in-house accident simply by the push of a button.

We at Ixanos, a spinoff company of UWI(SA), are fully equipped to work with the authorities, the security companies, large organisations and so be first in bringing into being a community-based personal security system so that the voices, the cries of the citizens may be heard in a timely fashion. Together we may save some lives. RIP, Andrea Bharatt.

Mr Prime Minister, we can do this.

ST CLAIR A KING

professor emeritus, UWI