Title Photo by Pixabay
We don’t think about it a lot, but safeguarding the public from crimes, disasters, and other potential dangers and threats permeates our society in a variety of ways. Be it police forces, fire services, the DOT, EMS, and others, the primary goal of public safety professionals is to prevent danger and protect the wellbeing of citizens, communities, and organizations, and perform that role to the best of their abilities.
I attended the FDIC International Conference in Indianapolis last April to engage with the Fire Rescue industry and learn about upcoming changes to industry technology. At the conference, there were more than 800 companies that chose to showcase their products or services, and from this event, there were multiple Public Safety Case Studies that could benefit from IoT technology. Let’s break down the top three IoT Public Safety Use Cases from this year’s FDIC International Conference.
Air Quality and Hazardous Gas Monitoring
At the FDIC Conference this year, there were several workshops and discussions revolving around air quality, hazardous gas monitoring, and ambient air monitoring. Companies within this industry are just starting to incorporate IoT in many of their products, and there’s a lot of excitement around moving into a space where they do real-time monitoring.
This was an area I was also excited about, as Blues Wireless has both products and customers for real time air quality monitoring. Plus. Blues Wireless has technology to build products that work with systems that companies in this industry already have. The ability to build a prototype quickly on the Blues platform, and then also scale it efficiently on the same platform, provides the foundation to create strong internet and connective capabilities. Blues Wireless has worked for many years to make the process as seamless and as connected as possible, so it is more convenient for the hardware engineer.
With this connectivity, individuals create systems that detect and monitor air quality, hazardous gas, and even ambient air. Blues Wireless offers a high level of out of the box functionality for connectivity, helping to trim time and risk from the hardware device development timeline.
Asset Tracking for Public Safety
Asset Tracking is one of the most important fundamental systems that individual companies within the Fire and Safety industry use on a regular basis. It is important to know where high value assets are at all times. First responder vehicles are mobile and can break down. Expensive equipment may have been borrowed and not in its regular place. Not having visibility into the specific location of your assets is a huge problem creating inefficiencies or even safety hazards.
Blues Wireless is one of the companies working to help companies have greater accessibility to asset tracking systems. Using a cellular network package and allowing a significant amount of data, asset trackers have more capabilities and end up saving more time and money on their processes.
Companies connect their IoT capabilities over the cellular network to monitor and track assets. Data is transferred with the Blues Wireless Notecard and easily delivered to the customer’s cloud of choice. Security is a key feature for the Blues Wireless Notecard. With an integrated STSAFE Secure Element with hardware crypto, true hardware random number generator, and a factory-installed ECC P-384 certificate provisioned at chip manufacture, the Notecard takes security to heart.
In addition, all transactions between the Notecard and Notehub.io utilize encrypted “off the Internet” communication protocols with VPN tunneling from cellular provider direct to cloud.
Predictive Maintenance for Public Safety
Predictive Maintenance, like remote/condition monitoring, is a strategy companies employ to monitor equipment and ensure that everything operates at an optimal level. Again, not the first thing you may think of when it comes to public safety, but if an ambulance service doesn’t know a vehicle has a faulty water pump and sends it out to respond to an emergency, there is a chance that ambulance doesn’t make it to its destination. Ambulances offer critical services delivered in an urgent manner, so equipment issues causing delays are disruptive to the chain of care. Further, if an ambulance isn’t roadworthy, it must be removed from service until the issue is addressed, affecting equipment capacity and utilization rates. Predictive maintenance is an underutilized tool and exciting space for IoT technology to grow so that industries in the realm of public safety support their community and perform optimally.
Companies that employ predictive maintenance will get more uptime from their equipment. As high-quality data on asset performance in the field increases, stakeholders make better decisions and allocate time and resources to the highest priority items. The cost of asset trackers decreases yearly and is no longer just for high-value assets, thanks in part to market changes like the Blues Wireless Notecard for only $49. Blues Wireless allows complete connectivity for predictive maintenance and remote condition monitoring, so companies take proactive action on potential issues versus the typical and suboptimal reactive posture.
Conclusion
These are just three use cases from the FDIC Conference offering to exponentially change your business capabilities. If you find yourself in need of these technologies, reach out to our team of experts to discover how Blues Wireless simplifies business and creates more streamlined development for your systems.
You’ll create seamless communications with the Blues Wireless Cellular System-on-a-module for IoT connectivity. You’ll minimize hardware device development costs and risk because of the out-of-the-box connectivity. Plus, there is less surface area for cybercriminals or accidental data leakage because of the built-in encryption, security, and encrypted data transmission from sensor to cloud.
Once you have the Notecard in your possession, you’ll go from unboxing to sending arbitrary data over the AT&T cellular network in about 30 minutes.. Our quickstart will show you the full capabilities of your new secure technology. To connect directly with me, Raghu Balijepalli, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, connect, ask questions, and see how Blues Wireless improves your business. I hope to meet you at an upcoming event this year.
