DENVER – Cell phones can help people stay in touch, but when it comes to making 911 calls there is a disconnect.

“In the old way of doing business with a telephone landline we knew exactly where you were every day. When you called 911 that information displayed on a screen,” said Carl Simpson, Denver 911 Executive Director.

Cell phones on the other hand do not show exactly where a person is located when a 911 call comes in. Thus, if someone does not know their location, it’s more difficult for emergency responders to find them.

“Cellular technology will give us the closest cellular site, but the way cell technology works, if that cell tower is full, the call is automatically bumped to the next cell tower,” Simpson said.

That means a person’s location could register quite a distance from where they truly are located. The GPS technology currently used could show a cell tower that is up to three football fields away from their actual location.

WirelessWERX, a company out of Anaheim, Calif., said they have found a solution. The Denver 911 Dispatch Center is currently testing the technology in a Denver University apartment complex, The University Lofts. The program called SiteWERX can detect a person’s exact location within a building when a 911 call is placed. It can even track a person’s movements as long as the phone call is connected. It will tell a 911 dispatcher what building the person is in, what floor they’re on, and even the exact room number.

In an area like a garage or an elevator where a 911 call would possibly not go through, the SiteWERX network can start to track a person before a traditional 911 call is completed if the number is dialed on the phone.

SiteWERX operates through the use of node technology. If the phone has Bluetooth technology and there is a node installed nearby, dispatchers will be able to track the location. The nodes, small white boxes, are installed in a building to make 911 calls easily traceable. SiteWERX sends a signal to the Internet and then back to the dispatcher. The number of nodes needed depends upon the building’s square footage.

“The MSRP cost of the node is $80, but purchased in volumes to cover a large building can be much lower. The nodes cover roughly 1,000 square feet. If you want to work out a basic cost, multiply your building square feet by this $80 number and then add in 10 percent to 15 percent installation costs,” WirelessWERX CEO Steve Artim said.

“It will quickly help us figure out where you are and when you’re not able to tell us yourself,” 911 operator Carl Woehrle said.

There is a strong need for Denver dispatchers to be able to track Denver cell phone users who make about 560,000 calls to 911 each year.

“Last month we were at 63 percent of our 911 calls were cellular based,” Simpson said.

WirelessWERX said there is a strong possibility the technology will be quite successful everywhere.

“We have run hundreds of test cases on the Denver Lofts installation and have gotten 97 percent accuracy on call placement within 10 meters and 100 percent accuracy on the exact floor level of the call,” Artim said.

Woehrle said that he thinks the new technology is promising.

“Once they work out the bugs in it and it works consistently on a wide-spread basis, it will really be a great tool,” Woehrle said.

Artim said the need for SiteWERX technology is growing, especially in college campuses.

“My kids are going to college next year. I have my first senior going. I’m talking to the university to say, ‘Hey, we really need to do this because universities have also cut the cord nationally.’ They’ve yanked out all the landlines in their dorms. You can’t even find a landline on a university campus. They’re 15-to-20 story freshman dorms and they’ve got one landline in the basement,” Artim said.

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DENVER – As more Americans cut the cord to their landlines and rely solely on cell phones, they’re unknowingly putting themselves at risk in an emergency.

Mobile 911 callers can sometimes be difficult to locate because the current 911 system uses 45-year-old technology based on addresses and pinpointing cell phones leaves a wide margin for error.

Now, Denver is the first city in the nation to test the new 911 Indoor Location Technology. Unlike any other system, it gives dispatchers a room-by-room layout of where the cell phone call is coming from.

More than 60 percent of the 911 calls coming in to Denver’s dispatch center are now from cell phones. But current technology gives 911 operators limited ability to pinpoint the location of the caller. They could be off by as much as three football fields even in best cases.

“We’re back to doing 911 the ‘old school’ way (asking) ‘Where are you? What’s your location?’ And we’re looking for landmarks that people can identify that can help us locate their position,” said Denver 911 Executive Director Carl Simpson.

But when a 911 call is made from an enabled cell phone in a pre-wired Denver apartment building near the University of Denver, Blue Tooth technology sends a signal through devices smaller than a sprinkler head, through the internet with the exact location of the caller.

As the 911 call comes in to the dispatch center, an on-screen display gives the emergency operator not only the street address, but the building layout, the exact floor and room number the call is coming from.

“To locate people outside of just a cell tower which could be a mile area, quarter mile area to give them the exact floor and room…that’s really the next generation,” said Steve Artim, CEO of Wireless Werx, which developed the technology.

Denver’s the first free test market for this indoor location technology, but in order for it to work the buildings have to be wired.

“Once they work out the bugs in it and it works consistently and on a more widespread basis throughout the city, it could really be a great tool,” said Carl Woehrle, a Denver 911 dispatcher.

As more people depend solely on wireless phones, 911 reliability becomes a growing challenge.

“This tool is amazing because it helps us find people calling 911 from their cell phones,” said Carl Simpson who runs Denver’s 911 system.

As this technology becomes more widely available, experts hope it will be cheap enough for apartment and office buildings to pay for having buildings wired. This only works with cell phones, so your office hard-wired phone would not be affected.

Denver taxpayers are not paying for the trial use of this system.

To view the video report of this story, visit KDVR.

DENVER, Jan. 20, 2010 – As more Americans cut the cord to their landlines and rely solely on their mobile phones, they unknowingly put themselves at risk in an emergency situation. Mobile 911 callers take longer to locate because the current 911 system was built to use addresses associated with landlines. Denver 911 is taking the lead in ensuring the safety of mobile callers by becoming the nation’s first Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) to implement SiteWERX–the industry’s most precise indoor location system that accurately pinpoints a mobile 911 caller’s location by including building, floor and room number.

WirelessWERX, the creator of SiteWERX and the leader in wireless indoor location services (ILS), will be demonstrating SiteWERX at the APCO Western Regional Conference 2010, which is taking place in Denver this week, Jan. 20-21, booth #208.

Today’s 911 systems provide a location within an area of confidence between 50-150 meters, or the equivalent of a football field. However, location results still vary and also do not supply indoor location information. This makes it difficult and inefficient for first responders to locate mobile 911 callers in multistory buildings or densely populated environments.

SiteWERX provides emergency responders with the indoor location information, down to the exact floor and room number, that is critical in a life or death situation. This type of indoor location information is more important today as more people use only their mobile phones. More than one out of every five American homes had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2009—an increase of 2.5 percent since the second half of 2008—and this trend is only expected to continue. According to CTIA, 296,000 E911 calls are made per day on wireless phones.

“Today’s 911 system is more than 40 years old and was built for landlines,” said Steve Artim, CEO of WirelessWERX. “More than 50 percent of 911 calls are made on wireless devices with half of those made indoors, leaving a large margin of chance for first responders to immediately get to 911 callers. Denver is a model city ensuring the safety of its residents by implementing SiteWERX to help public safety officials save time and save lives.”

About WirelessWERX, Inc.
Established in 1998, WirelessWERX is headquartered in Anaheim, Calif. WirelessWERX is a leader in delivering indoor location services (ILS) via Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices. The company has a long history of developing and deploying end-to-end solutions for the deployment of mobile resource management and tracking solutions as well as location-based services systems. WirelessWERX is a privately held venture funded company. For more information, visit www.wirelesswerx.com.

ANAHEIM, Calif., September 21, 2009—WirelessWERX (www.wirelesswerx.com), the leader in wireless indoor location services (ILS), today launched SiteWERX – the industry’s most precise indoor location technology for the mobile 911 caller. SiteWERX can locate a mobile 911 caller down to the building, floor and room.

“A 911 dispatcher’s greatest fear is not getting help to a victim quickly enough,” said Carl Simpson, executive director of Denver 911, the first Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) in the country to deploy SiteWERX. “SiteWERX helps us do our job better when locating people who call 911 from inside a building using mobile phones. Bottom line: we’re able to help people by getting first responders there faster.”

Steve Artim, CEO of WirelessWERX, explained, “Today, more than 50 percent of 911 calls are made on mobile phones and half of those are made indoors. The 911 system was created more than 40 years ago to address the landline environment. With more and more people relying only on their mobile phones, a 911 call location accuracy becomes a top concern for public safety and security personnel. WirelessWERX is powering the emergency system with the industry’s most accurate indoor location. And this precise location information can be the difference in a life or death situation.”

Currently, 911 call centers – or PSAPs – use GPS and triangulation to locate a mobile 911 caller. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandates PSAPs to be able to identify a mobile 911 caller’s location within an area of confidence of 50-150 meters. However, results can yield a location as far as 300 meters, an equivalent of three football fields or three city blocks. Today’s current systems do not provide indoor location, making it difficult for first responders to find callers in multistory buildings or dense environments like cities and college campuses. Whether the caller is in the basement or on the seventh floor, SiteWERX pins down a mobile phone caller’s location to within 10 meters (about 30 feet) and includes building, floor and room number.

SiteWERX is deployed as an in-building wireless node network. These location nodes are installed in a room or hallway. A Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone runs SiteWERX’s application, which sits dormant until a caller dials 911. The location node network software manages the nodes and sends location information to a 911 communication center. When a wireless 911 call is made, the caller’s building, floor and room location is automatically sent to the responder.

WirelessWERX is demonstrating its solutions portfolio for indoor location services this week during ASIS International, Sept. 21-24 in booth 2284 at the Anaheim Convention Center.

About WirelessWERX, Inc.
Established in 1998, WirelessWERX is headquartered in Anaheim, Calif. WirelessWERX is a leader in delivering indoor location services (ILS) via Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices. The company has a long history of developing and deploying end-to-end solutions for the deployment of mobile resource management and tracking solutions as well as location-based services systems. WirelessWERX is a privately held venture funded company. For more information, visit www.wirelesswerx.com.

Darlene Dukes struggled to speak as she called 911 from her cellphone. She could barely tell the operator her address: 602 Wales Drive.

The operator, trying to understand Dukes, sent an ambulance to Wells Street in Atlanta— 28 miles from Dukes’ apartment in Johns Creek, a suburb north of the city.

Paramedics finally reached the stricken woman almost an hour after her call on Aug. 2, 2008. They were too late. Forty minutes after arriving at the hospital, Dukes, 39, the mother of two boys, died of a blood clot in her lungs.

That cellphone call was critical. If Dukes had called from a land-line telephone, her address would have immediately popped up on the 911 operator’s screen, leaving no room for confusion.

Dukes’ case is like many others across the nation. For the millions of Americans giving up their land lines in favor of cellphones, dialing 911 may no longer mean a quick response. It can lead to misrouted calls, delayed information about the location of the caller and, most important, a slower emergency response.

“Lots of people are dying each year,” says David Aylward, director of Comcare Emergency Response Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group. “We’re sending in responders where they don’t know information about the person they are responding to. We’re sending them in looking for someone when they should know where they are exactly.”

Read the full story on USAToday.com

Sending help right away is the first priority for 911 dispatchers, but sometimes they can’t get all the information they need. Local dispatchers are exploring new technology that could keep us all safer.

If you were to call 911 today, dispatchers would know your location, but they wouldn’t know your specific location within a house or other building. If you can’t move or communicate on your cell phone, the response time could take too long.

Most of us are familiar with the images of a wide-scale emergency, perhaps a shooting at a college campus, like the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. On that day 911 dispatchers were flooded with calls from people pleading for help.

But there are plenty of stories we often don’t hear about, like a man having a heart attack in a Salt Lake motel and the dispatchers unable to find him.

Vickie Metcalf, a dispatcher with the Salt Lake City Police Department, told us that scenario happened last November. “He couldn’t talk. He wouldn’t get us any information. He was in extreme pain,” she said.

What if things were different? What if dispatchers could know your exact location – your building number, floor number, even your room number?

Bill Harry, the executive director of Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC), says, “Time is of the essence when you’re trying to find someone.”

VECC is looking at new technology. A company called WirelessWerx has created software and devices called nodes, which can be installed in a business, a sports complex, even a college campus.

“This sort of technology would completely cut out all of the guess work and investigation that you would have to do in order to find someone’s location,” Harry said.

The nodes can communicate with cell phones in the area, so that if someone calls 911, dispatchers not only know exactly where that person is but can send text messages with emergency instructions, for example, “Get under your desk, or if they’re on the next floor, to maybe get onto the roof, maybe to go out a different exit,” Bill McGraw, with WirelessWerx, said.

Dispatchers say there will need to be some equipment changes before the technology can be fully implemented, but they hope to make those changes down the road.

E-mail: wjohnson@ksl.com

Anaheim, Calif., November 18, 2008 — WirelessWERX, a leader in delivering in-building precise location technologies for mobile devices, is participating in a Proof of Concept test for the Next Generation 9-1-1 project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation. WirelessWERX’s SiteWERX platform is being used to collect and transmit location information from Bluetooth enabled mobile devices. The SiteWERX location information can give a caller’s precise location, down to the exact floor and room that the call is coming from.

This technology can also support text messaging and give the 911 center the location that the person is texting from. This is critical in hostage or campus gunman situations where a person is unable to make a call, but can send a text to 911 centers.

“WirelessWERX offers breakthrough precise location technology via SiteWERX that helps bring the 911 centers into the 21st century,” said project Director Dr. Walt Magnussen, “For the first time we can get exact location information and know what floor and what room someone is calling or texting from. That allows us to get help to people much faster Mobile device location is a significant issue that had to be resolved in the NG 9-1-1 Proof of Concept project. Wireless WERX provided a real world solution to this problem.”

The Proof of Concept started June 16, 2008 and will run through November 2008. Three testing laboratories and five Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) began transmitting data as the Proof of Concept (POC) portion of the U.S. DOT’s NG 9-1-1 Initiative. The three participating laboratories are housed at Booz Allen Hamilton, Texas A&M University and Columbia University. The five PSAPs are:

• City of Rochester – Emergency Communications Department, Rochester, NY
• King County E-911 System, Seattle, WA
• Metropolitan Emergency Services Board – Ramsey Co. Emergency Communications Center, St. Paul, MN
• State of Montana – Public Safety Services Bureau, Helena, MT
• State of Indiana – Office of State Treasurer, Indiana Wireless 911 Board
• The objective of the Proof of Concept is to test selected requirements including:
• The ability of PSAPs to receive voice, video, text (IM, SMS) and data
• Improving 9-1-1 access for deaf/hearing-impaired (e.g., Video Relay Services, text messaging)
• Caller’s location identification for landline, wireless and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) 9-1-1 calls
• Transmission of telematics data directly to the PSAP (Advanced Automatic Crash Notification) like crash location, speed, vehicular rollover, crash velocity
• 9-1-1 Call routing and call transfer based on caller’s location
• Internet Protocol (IP) networking and security

Following completion of the demonstration, data gathered during the POC will be analyzed and used to revise and complete the project’s preliminary system architecture and transition plan.

The US DOT NG 9-1-1 Initiative is an R&D project funded by the Intelligent Transportation Joint Program Office. To see all the planning and reference documents published as part of the NG 9-1-1 Initiative and for more information on the effort, go to www.its.dot.gov/NG911.

About WirelessWERX, Inc.
Established in 1998, WirelessWERX is headquartered in Anaheim, California. WirelessWERX is a leader in delivering in-building location information via Bluetooth enabled mobile devices. The company has a long history of developing and deploying end-to-end solutions for the deployment of Mobile Resource Management and Tracking solutions as well as Location Based Services Systems. WirelessWERX is a privately held venture funded company. For more information visit www.wirelesswerx.com or call +1-714-685-9776.

Media Contact:

Julie Vlahos
WirelessWERX
Phone: +1-415-298-4225
Email: JVlahos@wirelesswerx.com

Minutes before Teresa Sanchez and her brother Omar Aquino were shot to death in their Mountain View home Saturday morning, police believe Sanchez may have called 911 to report a break-in.
At 3:54 a.m., a California Highway Patrol dispatcher in Vallejo called Mountain View police to report a wireless 911 call. The dispatcher thought the caller said someone was breaking into a house on “Clemon” street, though there is no such street in Mountain View. As the caller was being transferred to local police, she either hung up or was cut off.

At 4:53 a.m., Mountain View police responded to a report of gunshots on the 1900 block of Plymouth Street. Officers entered the home to find Sanchez, 27, and Aquino, 24, dead from multiple bullet wounds.

Police also found Sanchez’s 8-year-old son sleeping in a bedroom, unharmed, and took him out through the bedroom window to shield him from the crime scene in the living room, police spokeswoman Liz Wylie said. He had slept through the entire event, she said, and is now staying with family.

After matching Sanchez’s cell phone number with the 911 caller’s, police are certain it’s the same. Wylie said she hasn’t heard the CHP recording but thinks the call lasted just a few seconds. While 911 calls in Mountain View are usually routed to local police, Sanchez was routed to a CHP dispatcher because of the house’s proximity to Highway 101. In the hour between the 911 call and the report of shots, Mountain View police attempted to secure the caller’s address through her cell phone provider and contacted other cities to determine where the caller was.

Wylie said police are still investigating what could have prompted the killings. Detectives have ruled out robbery because nothing was taken, Wylie said. And there also was no evidence of a forced entry.

So far, police believe that there were multiple suspects, who may have known the victims, and that an argument may have sparked the attack. One neighbor spotted a man leaving the residence and fleeing in a dark sedan.

Authorities are asking anyone with information about Saturday’s double homicide to call the Mountain View Police Department at 650-903-6344. People may call with information anonymously, Wylie said.

By Banks Albach
Bay Area News Group – Mercury News
Article Launched: 07/01/2008 01:32:09 AM PDT / Read the full story on MercuryNews.com

Five cities across the USA are testing a new national 911 system that would allow communications with police and other emergency personnel by text message and take advantage of the latest technology to pinpoint accident scenes.

Call centers in Rochester, N.Y; Bozeman, Mont.; King County, Wash.; St. Paul; and Fort Wayne, Ind. began testing the Department of Transportation’s Next Generation 9-1-1 system in June with the goal of replacing the four-decades-old technology that governs how the nation’s 6,000-plus 911 call centers operate. Read the full story on USAtoday.com