Gunshot detection for the masses

As the massacres in Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland and elsewhere have demonstrated, mass shootings can happen anywhere and anytime. And while the debate rages on in Washington and state legislatures across the country as to what steps need to be taken to help curb gun violence, one thing that nearly everyone agrees on is there needs to be greater investments made by schools and businesses in technology that can help prevent or mitigate casualties in active shooter scenarios.

Aside from video surveillance and access control, there has been a noticeable uptick in both interest and adoption of gunshot detection solutions by end-users recently, which has resulted in a number of companies entering the market with their own unique offerings. Despite the promise held by the technology and its ability to quickly provide accurate information about when and where a gunshot is fired within a facility, these solutions remain too costly for many end-users to implement, especially public schools which are working with already limited budgets.

For example, according to Allan Overcast, CEO and President of Shot Tracer Technologies, some companies are quoting end-users in excess $25,000 to deploy as few as one or two detectors and a dedicated server, which simply puts the technology out of reach for the majority of potential customers. Conversely, Shot Tracer’s detector, which is a self-contained solution about the size of small smoke detector, can be installed for just $1,000 per sensor and $10 per month for monitoring.

The Cost Misconception

Overcast believes the notion that gunshot detection has to be expensive to deploy is one of the biggest misconceptions in the industry.

“People have heard and people have assumed that gunshot detection has to be expensive,” he says.” I often get the question of, ‘Why are you so cheap?’ The question you should be asking is why are they so expensive?"

Overcast says he began Shot Tracer, which is a product of Tracer Technology Systems, as a private venture to see what could be done to provide authorities with more advanced warning of incidents involving gunfire and that he was initially motivated by the story of a Montana Highway Patrol officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 2010.

“That really bothered me because we have all of this high technology on our smartphones and our two-way radios but we’re not able to detect when an officer is in a gun battle,” he says. “Could we have saved his life if dispatch had been contacted within seconds saying an officer has just discharged his weapon and this is where he is located?”

Mike Anderson, president of gunshot detection startup Safe Zone, which is making its debut appearance at ISC West this year, says that lowering the costs and barriers to adopt this technology was one of things that motivated him to enter the market having spent the bulk of his career designing various consumer and home automation products.

“We have a definite cost difference between what we offer and what else is available on the market,” Anderson says. “Our devices are $149 and so we have a significant advantage in cost. Installation of our system is also a little more cost effective; it doesn’t require hardened boxes or anything like that. It’s a surface mount, very easy to get wire to and, in fact, the primary device is the Wi-Fi device so the installation is very easy.”

In the process of creating a new automation and control system for energy management at a former company, Anderson says they developed an occupancy sensor that they felt like could serve more than a single purpose. One of the first things they thought about adding was glass break detection but they soon realized that most glass break sensors were not very intelligent. 

“They can’t tell the different between the glass on a sliding glass door breaking or a single pane in a window breaking. It seems like most people would want to know what is getting broken, so we developed an intelligent glass break sensor technology that could do that and so we added that to the occupancy sensor,” Anderson says. 

Heading down this path eventually led Anderson and his team to think about expanding applications for these sensors, which resulted in the development of the Safe Zone detector.

“The glass break detector is an acoustic sensor, the occupancy sensor is an infrared sensor and so we started thinking about other applications for that and it occurred to us that gunfire might be something that it could do. We refined it a little bit, discovered there was a big market for a gunfire detector that is cost effective and so we spent some more time developing that and we got it to where it could discriminate between different types of firearms and ammunition by using a combination of infrared muzzle flash analysis and the analysis of the acoustic signature,” Anderson adds. “Now, we’re focused on that market alone.”

Different Detection Approaches

Overcast says he set out to develop a self-contained technology that was more cost effective than many of the other solutions on the market. After witnessing a bolt of lightning and the accompanying thunder clap outside his home one day, Overcast came up with an idea for the technology that would drive his company’s product.

“Lightning and thunder is very similar to what a gunshot is,” he explains. “When a firing pin hits a bullet, the bullet primer goes off, it vaporizes the gunpowder, the air pressure­­ – because the gun powder is now converted to air, to gases – blows the bullet out just like a spit wad, totally silent, and all of sudden this bullet is screaming through the air. The bullet then peels the air apart and I have outgassing from all that air and when that outgassing collapses you get your bang.

“So what I did is develop a sensor that models and looks at air pressure compared to an air pressure standard… along with a microphone so when a gunshot goes off, we see a spike in air pressure and then we see a boom, which happens anywhere from three to five milliseconds later,” Overcast continues. “Then we look at the timing of the event, the length of the event and at the end of our little equation we get a yes or no, not a maybe, a yes or no. In order for us to detect a gunshot we have to have a pressure event and an acoustic event and they have to be the right length and the right time.”

Overcast subsequently took this complex algorithm, embedded it within a single chip along with the air pressure and microphone sensor to create an affordable gunshot detector.

Another thing that Overcast says really differentiates Shot Tracer from some of the vendors in the market is that their solution is standalone, meaning that their detector can be deployed without an expensive server.  “I can have one small sensor and be able to detect gunshots. That’s a big deal,” he says. 

In addition, Overcast says that they don’t offload any of the data from their sensor nor do they touch the customer’s network or run an operating system that can be hacked or contain viruses. Should the main power source to a facility be cut, the Shot Tracer sensor can run for up to 24 hours on battery backup. The IP-enabled sensor also leverages a cloud-based notification system to alert users that a gunshot has been detection.    

According to Anderson, Safe Zone has decided to take a different approach and that rather than use detectors as individual, standalone solutions; they actually pull together data from multiple detectors and analyze disturbances as a single event.  “If you fire a gun, the detector in that room is going to pick it up but also the detectors in the adjacent rooms and in the hallway are going to pick it up, so we analyze data from all of those detectors together which gives us much higher accuracy and more reliable prediction of what type of weapon it is,” he explains.

Anderson believes one of the current shortfalls of gunshot detection is that end-users are hesitant to deploy the number of sensors necessary to achieve the level of accuracy needed for most installations.

“The thing about gunfire detection is you want to get it accurate and really provide the data that law enforcement needs to respond,” he adds. “It takes more detectors than most people are putting in with the other systems simply because of the costs involved.”

Before investing in gunshot detection solutions, Overcast says people really need to understand not only how much it is going to cost them but also what they money is “going to buy them.”

“Would I like this to be in every classroom in every school, yeah but that’s not practical,” he says. “When we look at where most events happen, they start in the hallways and the entrances, so say, ‘hey, let’s just do something to get started.’”

Anderson says that one of the biggest market challenges is simply creating awareness about the technology itself and that it can be affordable to boot. “People need to understand that these systems are available and that they will save lives,” he says. 

About the Author: 

Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].