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"Home Safety"
On-campus sexual assault is an issue that every public safety department at universities must contend with. According to a study of undergraduate students by the Archives and Pediatrics of Adolescent Medicine, 53% of women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence and the hands of their partner. However, when a women is raped on a campus, it not only harms the survivor of this horrendous crime, but leads to all women not feeling safe at school, where the rape occurred. Unfortunately, when sexual assaults happen on campus, many female students tend to live in fear that a perpetrator could be lurking around the next corner. This assertion is not hyperbolic ranting, but rather a concrete reality that women across North America undergo during their college years.
Preventing these sexual assaults and helping women feel safe at school, clearly should be a major concern for any university public safety official. To prevent these heinous crimes and to create a campus culture that allows women to feel safe, law enforcement at universities must develop and invest in the best communication tools, which can help reduce and prevent rapes from occurring under their watch. Creating an effective two-way communication system between the student body and on-campus security services will both help women feel safe at school and provide quick access to help should they feel threatened.
To prevent sexual assault and other forms of campus crimes, most universities currently use emergency light phones. Emergency light phones are land-line phones which are scattered throughout college campuses and provide students with instant direct access to on-campus security. They allow students to instantaneously contact campus security, helping to improve in school safety.
While these emergency light phones allow women to feel safe at school and prevent sexual assaults, they do not heavily implement breakthrough technologies such as smartphone technology. Therefore, these emergency phones are not nearly as effective at preventing on-campus sexual assault as they could be. More specifically, emergency light phones are land-line phones and are located in fixed-positions on campus. If a woman feels threatened on campus, depending on her location, she may not have immediate access to an emergency light phone and its communication features. This presents a serious accessibility problem to campus police and public safety officials at schools, since women may not be able to reach them adequately during an attack or times of distress.
With the high adoption rate of smartphones among college students, public safety administrators now have an opportunity to implement a more effective emergency light phone solution to prevent sexual assault. For example, Guardly, provides universities with a Safe Campus Program which effectively turns a student’s smartphone into an emergency light phone. If a woman on campus feels threatened they can use Guardly to immediately contact and communicate with on-campus security and police, regardless of their location. Guardly uses GPS, cell-tower location and wifi hotspot locations to ensure the most accurate location positioning possible with your smartphone. When you use your mobile phone to call campus police, they will not know your location. Alternatively, when someone uses a land-line emergency light phone, the on-campus security or police only have access to the location of the phone which was used.
Sexual assaults may occur in many different locations or places on campus, and may include a chase or full-scale abduction, which would mean the victim and attacker would continually change locations. These rapid location changes make it very difficult for authorities to locate the attack when an emergency light phone is used to announce the emergency incident. Guardly solves this problem because it tracks the victim’s location using their smartphone’s GPS functionality and helps campus police to locate the victim regardless of the their location. By taking advantage of mobile technology, Guardly improves in school safety and reduces the number of on-campus sexual assaults by bringing emergency light phones into the 21st century.
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As the world surveys the damage dealt by the recent earthquake and Hurricane Irene, the Guardly Team is doing our best to learn from this experience to further enhance the mobile safety options available to people during an emergency.
When disaster strikes, one of the first things we do is reach for the phone: whether it’s to make a call for help, or alert loved ones of impending danger, phones have become an essential part of our emergency toolkits.
However, during a natural disaster, our heavy reliance on phones can lead to a shutdown of the vital networks that sustain them.
Case in point being the August 23 earthquake. Immediately following the tremors, several mobile phone providers reported heavy call volume, which led to network congestion, call spikes and service disruptions for up to an hour. Cellular relay stations have a limit on the number of calls they can simultaneously handle. Furthermore, calls of emergency response personnel are given priority on the network. This can result in one’s call getting cut off, or not going through at all.
Aside from voice calling, cell phone users have other lines of communication available to them in the course of an emergency. Short Message Service (SMS) texts require a fraction of the bandwidth of a call and can be typed anywhere at anytime. Emails are another alternative, as long as a wireless connection is available.
Guardly’s mobile personal safety app brings all of these avenues together: with just one-tap on their phone, users can call, text and email contacts in their personal safety network, as well as dial 911. And if users experience a service disruption, Guardly will continue to search for a network and automatically resend all alerts once a connection has been established.
Visit the Guardly website to find out more. Guardly is available on iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 smartphones. Guardly for Android is in development and will be announced shortly. Stay safe!
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“A child goes missing every 40 seconds in America.” That’s the first line that appears on a poster from the Federal Bureau of Investigation promoting their new mobile application: the Child ID app.
Available solely on the iPhone, the Child ID app acts as a storehouse where parents can save their children’s vital information, such as photographs, weight, height and identifying marks. When their child goes missing, parents can show nearby police or security officers their child’s data in order to assist the search process. The app also includes a section with helpful links and safety tips, and buttons that dial 911 or the NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children).
Since it’s recent August 5th launch, Child ID has received consistent criticism from its users regarding a few noticeable faults. The complaints focus on features that either lack some evidently necessary component, or perform superfluous functions.
The most common concern among users has been the app’s lack of password protection. This could potentially turn the app into an instrument of harm, should it fall into the wrong hands. Armed with a child’s detailed digital description, a predator would make easy work of tracking down his prey.
Another defect lies in the app’s emergency email function. The FBI website states that by “using a special tab on the app, you can also quickly and easily e-mail the information to authorities with a few clicks.” However, no email addresses are provided. Searching for law enforcement email addresses online is not something a parent has time for when their child has just gone missing.
Child ID’s helpful links and safety tips sections aren’t much help either, consisting of general, commonsense guidelines such as, “Do not leave your young children home alone,” and “Make sure that your child knows his/her full name.” While the inclusion of a help section is always welcome, in this case it does little to enhance the app’s value.
Though the FBI is to be commended for developing an app that strives to improve child safety, parents should know that there are superior alternatives available.
Guardly, a mobile personal safety app, allows parents and their children to stay connected at the first sign of an emergency. With just one touch, Guardly both alerts contacts in your personal safety network, and dials 911. Once connected, you can collaborate with friends and family, while Guardly’s real-time location tracking keeps your loved ones aware of your whereabouts, even if you’re on the move.
Visit the Guardly website to find out more. The Guardly app is available on iPhone through the Apple App Store, and is coming soon to Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 platforms. Stay safe!
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Our population is aging quickly. If we use Canada as an example, seniors now make up the fastest-growing age group. In 2010, an estimated 4.8 million Canadians were 65 years of age or older, a number that is expected to double in the next 25 years to reach 10.4 million seniors by 2036.
Devastating falls in the home are the most common cause of injury among the elderly and the most expensive category of injury for the Canadian healthcare system, costing over $6.2 billion in 2004 alone.
Guardly has been adapting our new smartphone-based personal safety service into a next-generation automated emergency response system for the elderly. Our service will improve their safety and well-being and allow them to remain independent longer, while reducing the burden on long-term care facilities.
For those new to Guardly, our service instantly connects emergency victims to authorities and a trusted network of friends and family. The service combines voice conference calls, email and text messages, location tracking, and the web in efforts to decrease overall response time and ensure calls for help are quickly answered.
Next Generation Personal Emergency Response System
The Guardly Team has been working with groups like the University of Toronto’s Intelligent Assistive Technology and Systems Lab (IATSL) to adapt our new emergency communications technology and jointly develop a next-generation personal emergency response system for our aging population.
IATSL is developing ceiling mounted devices that use artificial intelligence and advanced sensing; the solution will automatically detect a fall and converse with the person to determine the type of assistance needed. If they request help or their response isn’t understood due to injury such as a stroke, the system will automatically initiate an emergency alert using Guardly to selectively notify 911, family or neighbors.
Research into aging-in-place isn’t just happening in North America. A European project called Netcarity is researching and testing technologies for the elderly.
Netcarity participants include academics, technology firms, psychologists, sociologists, care centre designers and government authorities. Their goal is to turn older peoples’ homes into supportive environments that include them in society and postpone or avoid the expensive and traumatic move into long-term care centres or nursing homes. The group recently authored a discussion paper titled “The Business of Ageing” that explores the commercial challenges and opportunities in ambient assisted living.
It’s not hard to see that the combination of Guardly with advanced sensors is a significant improvement over current systems that require a senior to remember to wear a panic button as well as be physically and mentally capable to trigger an emergency alert after being injured in a fall or from a heart attack or stroke
In the short-term, we expect to achieve positive results from several trials to be conducted at nursing homes and rehabilitation centres. However, in the long-term, we expect to see the combined Guardly/IATSL at-home patient monitoring service to become a new standard form of care for the independent aging-in-place population. True success would be defined as achieving an increase in our customers’ quality of life for a price that is less than the current standard of care for those that want to remain independent of long-term care facilities.
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There’s few thoughts more unsettling than having your home broken into. One minute your sleeping safe and sound in your warm bed, the next your wide awake wondering if you really heard footsteps on the main floor. If your home does get broken into, your first thought may be to arm yourself with a blunt object to defend yourself. A safer move is to have Guardly downloaded on your smartphone and placed on your night table. This way, in case of emergency, you can quickly alert your emergency contacts and the authorities at the tap of a button. And unlike a blunt object, the Guardly app can’t be turned against you by a potential intruder. Below you’ll find stats about home invasions in the United States (infographic by Brian Clark Howard – HuffingtonPost).
The info:
- 28,800 property crimes per day – 1 property crime occurs every 3 seconds
- 8,640 burglaries per day – 1 burglary occurs every 10 seconds
- 4,320 violent crimes per day – 1 violent crime occurs every 20 seconds
- 2,468 grave assaults per day – 1 grave assault occurs every 35 seconds
- 1,440 robberies per day – 1 robbery occurs every minute
- 720 forcible rapes per day – 1 forcible rape occurs every 2 minutes
- 1 out of 5 homes will experience a break-in or invasion
- 8,000+ home invasions occur in North America every day
- 38% of assaults + 60% of rapes occur in home invasions
- 3,600,000 is the average number of home invasions that occurred annually between 1994-2000
- Reasons to care about home security: (1) $17.99 can buy a set of 6 bump keys, (2) thieves can unlock 90% of doors with Lock Bumping, (3) experts say no traditional lock is bump proof, (4) lock bumping is spreading because of the Internet
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