Guardly releases industry-first integrated indoor positioning system

TORONTO, ONTARIO--April 8, 2013 -- Guardly today announced the launch of its Indoor Positioning System (IPS), the industry's first mobile safety solution that offers integrated indoor location detection capabilities. Guardly IPS further enhances Guardly's existing mobile safety solutions for the enterprise by transmitting the building, floor and specific room of a mobile emergency caller in under 5 seconds and tracking indoor location changes in real-time thereafter.

Guardly provides mobile safety apps and cloud infrastructure for enterprise and public safety. Guardly's mobile safety apps act as personal emergency phones that broadcast real-time location, identity and support two-way communication with private security, authorities and personal safety groups. For enterprise security and police dispatch, Guardly provides a cloud-based incident management system rich with situational data to monitor, manage and respond to on-premise and remote worker emergencies.

Guardly Safe Campus™, a solution designed for schools, was shown to help reduce emergency response times by around 44% at a university in a customer-led study performed 6 months ago. "Our IPS technology is another step towards Guardly delivering on its corporate mission to reduce emergency response times for people needing immediate assistance, and for those responding to requests for assistance," says Josh Sookman, Guardly Founder & CEO. "With Guardly IPS, all someone needs to do is launch our safety app and it will result in a personalized response to their exact indoor location. The implications of this innovation are truly game changing."

When an emergency occurs on a school campus or within a corporate office, hospital or public venue today, most calls made to local security personnel or police come from mobile phones or fixed emergency call boxes. Traditional emergency calls from mobile phones handled by the enterprise lack any form of indoor or outdoor location data, making it difficult to initiate response efforts; this can be further exacerbated if the mobile caller is unable to speak. While calls from emergency call boxes may have associated location data, emergencies can shift in location over time resulting in difficulties maintaining communication and coordinating response efforts.

"When a police dispatcher is working an emergency call, one of the first pieces of information required is an accurate location. Having the indoor location of mobile callers immediately available to dispatchers serves to reduce response times, especially for any campus that has multi-story buildings," said Rocco DelMonaco, Past VP University Safety at Georgetown University.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that 70% of 911 calls today are from wireless phones and that percentage is growing.ⁱ In context of 911 public safety networks, as of September 11, 2012 the FCC enforces Wireless E911 Phase 2 requirements, which state that wireless network operators must provide the GPS location of callers within 300 meters, within 6 minutes of a request by a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). Guardly IPS delivers at least an order of magnitude improvement in mobile emergency caller location accuracy over current public safety standards, giving its customers more precise data to act on and share with first responders to ensure more immediate and personalized emergency responses.

Guardly IPS works seamlessly with the Guardly mobile safety applications for Android devices and enterprise solutions, such as Safe Campus™ and Building Safety solutions. Guardly IPS leverages existing infrastructure within buildings to lower the total cost of ownership and extend personal safety to regions such as underground garages and cellular dead zones that typically inhibit calls being made to emergency services.