Volume 9, Number 4 • July/August 2001 • Small Business/SBIR

Alert System Warns of Hazards

A new emergency management early warning system, developed under the SBIR program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), provides notification to users via location-intelligent pagers of life-threatening hazards and two-way communications for critical notifications such as tornadoes, floods and chemical spills.

The Earth Alert system, developed by Aeptec Microsystems, Inc., utilizes existing Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) and pager/cellular infrastructure to effectively integrate, analyze and disseminate information for emergency management. The system is designed to feed location-intelligent data to/from a centralized emergency response data center. The field users and the Emergency Operations Center can more effectively integrate, analyze and disseminate information for emergency management. It interprets incoming warnings, cautions and advisory information into geo-referenced events that require monitoring or response from the emergency community and issues, and receives notification via the pager infrastructure. Additionally, it is envisioned that Earth Alert-equipped pagers and fixed receivers located in schools, hospitals, businesses, churches and other facilities can receive the warning message.

Aeptec has designed a two-way cradle with built-in GPS and a two-way pager for use with Palm devices. Additionally, the Earth Alert application runs on the Palm devices and provides graphic display capabilities that allow the user’s location to be displayed in relation to the hazard’s location. The system will enable emergency managers in the field, as well as the community, to receive timely warnings specific to their area to spur life-saving action when needed. The notification and transmission of emergency information to users are determined by a user profile that has an innovative attribute—its GPS location. This allows for targeted communications of an event to only those users within an area of pending actual disaster impact. The two-way capability of the built-in pagers also provides location-intelligent communications to an Emergency Operations Center (EOC). Police and firefighters can use the location information to coordinate rescue activities. The weather and GPS capabilities in the handheld pager devices will also have significant commercial value in commercial fishing, boating, hiking, trucking and traveling.

During the early development of the SBIR project, meetings were held with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Weather Service, GSFC and other emergency agencies to determine the system requirements. GSFC has developed the enabling technology in the last 10 years, but a distribution system capable of delivering urgent disaster warning information in a timely manner to the appropriate people within a specific community was not currently available.

Available resources and infrastructure were utilized to provide the emergency management capability. The National Weather Service has emergency information such as severe weather path forecasting and area of impact available for distribution, the Earth Alert universal pager infrastructure provides means of notification, and the GPS can provide location tracking. Aeptec’s goal is to meet the requirements of FEMA and NOAA by integrating the available resources into the Earth Alert system, developing a general-purpose application that can run on a diverse suite of commercial hardware, such as the Palm or WinCE devices. The Earth Alert concept has resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between FEMA and GSFC to transfer technologies that will assist in the mitigation of disasters.

Aeptec has successfully designed, built and tested the handheld units that incorporate the two-way paging, GPS and graphical and text display functions. The software used by the handheld units, data center servers and EOC clients has been developed and tested. Field testing of the entire prototype system will be performed at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds this summer for a disaster mitigation study. Q

For more information, contact Fred Schamann at Goddard Space Flight Center, & 301/286-7039, ) schamann@gsfc.nasa.gov or Matt Herl at AEPTEC, & 301/670-6770. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

NASA Official: Jonathan Root • Web Design: Printing & Design Office, NASA Headquarters • Credits