Hospitals, educational institutions, industrial sites, retirement living homes all have staff, clients, residents or students that could be anywhere on the property and suffer mobile duress. In any situation where someone needs help – the use of ‘panic’ or ‘help me’ buttons or pendants can be used to call for help, providing location information.

It might be staff who are in a high-risk environments or need others to help resolve a situation. It could be a student needing help on campus or a senior needing help in a hime. When this happens, we refer to it as mobile duress.

A speedy response is often critical in these circumstances. Knowing the location of the person needing help is crucial in providing the fastest response. So a system that can not only receive the alert but provide location based information when notifying respondents is key to a positive outcome.

Status Solution’s SARA stands for Situational Awareness and Response Assistant. Situational awareness is a risk management strategy that is intended to understand the threat and determine the best way to handle that threat. Today it is used as a framework for life safety, security, environmental monitoring and mass notification situations.

There are several ways to create and provide positioning information regarding the location of the ‘panic button.’ However, most rely on an 802.11 WiFi network as the underlying structure. This is an incredibly expensive and limiting infrastructure on which to base a life safety application. WiFi Access Points (APs) have a limited range, so it requires many to be installed to provide appropriate coverage, especially if being used for positioning. These all have to be powered and connect via Ethernet switches which would be expensive and difficult to put onto emergency power in the case of a power failure. Let alone the challenge to work outside to cover any external spaces.

Mobile duress is mostly used in life safety situations. The need to escalate if the person notified does not respond is critical. Status Solution’s SARA uses pre-determined escalation paths based on the type of event. In the case of student on a campus, it would be to send to the security person closest to the area. However, if that person does not respond in a pre-determined time, it will escalate to the another security person, their supervisor or perhaps both.

Automating these tasks ensures that the organisation always follows the planned strategy in responding to the different events.