Mobile working
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www.criticalcomms.com March 2019
ngerprint reader to the bottom of your smartphone, open
up the biometric services application and get the member
of the public to put their nger on the reader,” says
Robinson. “Pronto then checks the databases.”
at saves the ocer a signicant amount of time.
Robinson anticipates that in the future, fewer peripherals
such as ngerprint readers will be required as it will be
possible to do everything on the smartphone itself.
While signicant improvements have been made
and continue to be made, there is still room for further
improvement. One potential lingering issue is the
connectivity requirements of this type of kit.
“Some processes need immediate connectivity – for
example, reporting on an incident in real time – others
are not so time-critical,” says Eccles. “Applications which
don’t require continuous connectivity will tend to be more
resilient and may make better use of network resources,
as they can transmit less urgent data at a lower priority,
ensuring critical communications are reserved for those
time-critical uses.”
Any concerns around connectivity problems will
be almost completely eradicated when 5G is widely
introduced. “5G will be a game-changer for public safety
and it will really drive this market,” says Lynch. However,
he is quick to point out that we still don’t have widespread
4G coverage, so even though 5G may be “just around
the corner for consumers, it’s a long way away for public
safety users”.
e market will continue to boom regardless, according
to Lynch. “We live in a world where terrorism continues to
rise, where there are more natural disasters and where more
public safety organisations are looking for eciency gains,”
he says. “e world has changed and technology has really
made an impact. For public safety to keep up with these
changes they need to change their approach and be much
more technology-focused.”
The use of
systems to allow
police ofcers to
take ngerprints
on the move and
avoid having to
transcribe written
statements helps
save valuable time
Apps which don’t require continuous
connectivity will tend to be more
resilient and may make better use of
resources, as they can transmit
less urgent data at a lower priority
The rise of AI
Many public safety mobile working solutions started out
with the aim of increasing efciencies and reducing the
need for manual inputting of information.
But over the coming years, SceneDoc’s Alex Kottoor
believes that greater levels of integration of machine
leaning and articial intelligence (AI) in mobile working
products will bring radical efciency improvements.
“If you think about the manual process of data
collection and reporting, so much of this can be sped
up using machine learning and AI,” says Kottoor. “We’ve
already started to introduce little bits of that AI in our
forms engine to cut down on the number of elds ofcers
see when they are doing a crash report, for example.”
He says the end game is “reducing clicks to make it
as fast as humanly possible to write a report, with a goal
of radically reducing the manual process of reporting
altogether. If we can get to the day where 75 per cent of
the report is pre-lled because of what the ofcer has
already witnessed or the agency has already collected
on that given subject – that’s the goal.”
It’s an ambition that is shared by Motorola Solutions.
David Robinson says the company is looking at how it
can introduce AI to make life even easier for ofcers.
“At the moment mobile data solutions are userled,”
says Robinson. “So I, as an ofcer am capturing
information and putting it into a system. Why is it not the
case the system knows both where and when the crimes
may have been committed and the device knows where I
am because it’s GPS-enabled?”
In addition to easing the burden of recording
information, he believes that AI offers the opportunity to
proactively task and brief ofcers in real time.
“There are various analytics solutions across the world
that can predict to a fairly high degree of condence
where anti-social behaviour will occur, and we now know
– because ofcers are capturing information in real
time – where stop searches are being conducted, for
example,” explains Robinson.
“So the system will know where all of the anti-social
behaviour is occurring and say ‘we know that for the
next three hours we need lots of ofcers in the north
of the division, and yet we can see on the system that
in the last 15 minutes all of the stop searches have
occurred in the south of the division’.”
He adds that this type of proactive tasking and brieng
is the inevitable next step in terms of the functionality of
public safety mobile working solutions.
“All of the technological building blocks are actually
largely already in place – it’s just a question of reengineering
them slightly so that they are proactive
rather than reactive,” says Robinson.
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