EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONChanneling NEXTGEN TV to Help Responders Answer the Call

A natural disaster strikes, vehicles collide on a snowy highway, a 5-alarm fire blazes through the night. In these moments, we rely on our first responders to arrive on the scene and render lifesaving care swiftly and efficiently. Every second counts, and open communication is essential to mission success. This is why the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is collaborating on a new effort to arm agencies with a digital alerting system that taps into NEXTGEN public TV broadcasting technologies to deliver emergency dispatches faster.

An estimated 240 million calls are made to 911 in the U.S. each year. “Agencies need to have the most up-to-date technologies and tools that will enable them to continue answering and responding to these calls in a timely fashion,” said S&T program manager Karen “Maua” Johnson. “We are collaborating with several partners to ensure that they have access to these resources, and also enhance technology for a more reliable and seamless communication capability.”

Thanks to a Small Business Innovation Research program award, S&T has joined forces with wireless technology engineering firm Device Solutions Inc., the Wireless Research Center of North Carolina, PBS North Carolina, Triveni Digital, and additional government and private stakeholders to prototype an extensible, end-to-end emergency digital paging solution that utilizes public television broadcasting technology (ATSC 3.0) to transmit emergency data to first responders across the state of North Carolina. ATSC 3.0 was chosen for its ability to support emergency response agencies as they increasingly turn to the use of multimedia such as video and photo messaging, file transfers, and location sharing as their primary means of receiving critical information during emergencies.

For this initiative, S&T and Device Solutions Inc developed and deployed a custom, portable, ATSC 3.0 receiver with first responders to demonstrate and verify that it could deliver critical emergency data and improve situational awareness. Once implemented in the field, this technology will serve as a flexible tool that can be readily adapted to a variety of datacasting applications and types of media.

“ATSC 3.0 datacasting can prove to be an effective secondary means of secure communication to increase situational awareness and supplement or replace the older analog radio and cellular technologies that are currently being used by our first responders,” said Device Solutions Director of Technology Strategy Tony Sammarco.