Real Time Response System towards Safety and Emergency Management Improvement in critical infrastructures and soft targets

Project Information

StandBy-U

Grant agreement ID: 728673

DOI

10.3030/728673

Project closed

EC signature date 23 June 2016

Start date 1 June 2016

End date 31 August 2016

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

ASK COMMUNITY SYSTEMS BV
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - StandBy-U (Real Time Response System towards Safety and Emergency Management Improvement in critical infrastructures and soft targets)

Reporting period: 2016-06-01 to 2016-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Only in 2012, almost 2.5 million workers in the EU-28 were injured and 3,515 suffered fatal accidents at their workplace, while costs derived from emergency situations were estimated at €204 billion in 2013.
Europe faces growing challenges asking to reinforce its capacity to prevent and react to emergencies. Increased threats call for investments to ensure service level while maintaining budget allocation.
Emergency management is a very complex task, aiming at taking the best possible decisions and allocating resources to achieve priority objectives. Due to this complexity, ICT tools greatly improve the effectiveness of prevention and management of emergencies when integrated into normal day-to-day management operations.
StandBy-U is a solution for emergency and safety management that provides a holistic and automatic set of functionalities. It combines resource management with technology for achieving situation awareness, in order to provide a system to interact (via the StandBy-U app) with a large number of users simultaneously; taking into account context information both from users (e.g. their position) and external sources (e.g. Google traffic APIs, beacons, detector’s alarms); resulting in advanced coordination and routing mechanisms. We have identified competing solutions that partially cover features of Standby-U, but most of them are intended for specific applications, not being able to adapt to other contexts.
Our business innovation project will be based on both technical and commercial tasks. The funds from the SME instrument will help us to achieve our goals in two years, arriving to the target markets as a technological leader and thus having a competitive advantage over the current alternatives or eventual new solutions. Thanks to these activities, we will be able to prepare the full commercialisation of the upgraded version, which is estimated to support the growth of our company to 22 employees and provide cumulative revenue of €13.4million in 5 years.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Standby-U is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that currently provides the following functionality:
-SW agents to allow context information handling and multi-device support.
-IOS and Android fully developed applications with easy-to-use and friendly graphical interfaces.
-The agent architecture gathers and processes context information from diverse sources such as the GPS, Wi-Fi location, BT beacons, fall and movement sensors, alarms and other systems through protocol converters.
-The communication module is completed with features to automatically connect with the necessary parties (alarming) through instant messaging, SMS, email and phone calls. Integrated agenda
-Automatic generation of profiles in a building, to dynamically offer information about staff presence.
Besides, interesting feedback was collected through a survey among StandBy users, where we found that most of them are satisfied with the design (82%), usage (75%), functionality (87%) and the overall app (75%).
Taking into account the stage of development of each component of Standby-U we consider TRL-7 (system prototype demonstration in operational environment).
From the commercial perspective, the previous version of Standby-U has already achieved commercial application. For example, Sodexo’s and NS (Dutch Railway) headquarters have implemented our system for safety and emergency management in their office buildings, and the Police of The Netherlands and other safety- and security-related entities are using our solution for first responders. These are key milestones, since engagement with several types of clients has provided valuable insight to develop the product to fit their needs (see section 4.1 for details on partners).
Current Standby-U clients and other end users will continue to be involved in the development of the project, and letters of interest from some of these players were received addressing their interest in the outcomes and upgraded version of Standby-U (to be attached in the Phase II proposal). Consequently, we have assured a minimum customer base to commercialise the final solution, assuming a commercial readiness level in stage two (CRL-2).
We are pursuing the involvement and support of private investors in order to support the company’s growth beyond the finalization of phase 2 and through commercial exploitation. In this regard we have also obtained written interest from Toro Ventures and from our current investor Almende Investments.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our main advantage is our capability to integrate heterogeneous systems and provide a unique set of assets:
-Portaphone features allow a better communication in emergency situations (noise reduction, ordered speech and user groups). Besides, the multi-channel capabilities (Wi-Fi, BT, GSM/3G/4G, LTE and wired communications) assure the widest range of options to stablish links in emergency situations.
-By managing all communications through the Standby-U app, cost of purchasing additional HW is avoided.
-Standby-U eases the interaction of the first responder with the coordinator with its one touch change in availability and alarm response, as well as the availability automated update subject to context information.
-Standby-U automatically calculates the need for personnel, ensures the availability of responders if any understaffing event is identify and communicates with responders when an alarm comes in. Hence there is a direct saving in man hours for these avoided tasks of coordination and communications (calls, SMS, pages…). Coordinators have been unburdened of unnecessary information gathering tasks, availability of necessary personnel in the event of an emergency is ensured and, alarming is automatically handled.
-One of the key features of Standby-U is providing flexible and reliable management of first respondents according to their estimated time of arrival to a station or emergency situation. For that reason, we can make the highest impact for emergency management organizations that employ a combination of stationed and on-call responders.
-StandBy can either be deployed to substitute current systems or to open up new synergy possibilities.
In the future, the modular adaptability of StandBy-U will make it able to include more functionality, as well as cover more necessities. Here, we can include: applicability to any commercial need, making StandBy-U a universal tool for safety and emergency management; study and prediction of working patterns; notifications, information and reports about the company’s activity; and the support for coordination and integration of IT resources. We will also develop the adequate functionalities to acquire and process information from fire detection and extinguishing systems (sprinklers, smoke detectors, air quality sensors, control centres, IoT devices, etc.

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