Texas A&M-San Antonio Deploys Indoor Positioning

The campus at Texas A&M University-San Antonio (A&MSA) is rapidly expanding, having completed its first residence hall in 2018 with more new buildings planned to follow, and students now living and working on the site 24/7 for the first time. With an increased workload to manage the A&M-SA Police Department wanted to improve their command and control capabilities.

To solve this challenge, they turned to SafeZone technology, which helps universities provide for the safety and wellbeing of students and staff. In addition, it enhances team-working between their own officers and the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) volunteers available to assist first responders with critical incidents response and recovery.

The SafeZone solution enables A&M-SA police dispatchers and officers on patrol to visualize the precise location of anyone using the service to call for help, anywhere on campus, speeding up response. In addition, both dispatch and mobile officers have complete situational awareness, with the technology letting them see the location of each police officer updated in real time.

With additional multi-story buildings, A&M-SA recognized the need to obtain more granular information. The SafeZone Indoor Positioning technology pinpoints the exact floor, wing and room where an alert is triggered, providing a 3D view of where calls for help are raised with the SafeZone App, as well as the location of each officer in that building. This level of accuracy is not offered by other solutions.

A&M-SA is actually the first campus in the world to deploy this technology across its entire site and to adopt it as a construction standard for all future buildings. The indoor positioning function is enabled through the special SafeZone software and a series of wireless Bluetooth beacons, which are easy to install and operate. The result is a more accurate and affordable solution than traditional, fixed panic alarms and emergency blue light telephones, which are expensive to install and maintain.

This indoor positioning capability is just one feature of the robust SafeZone solution, which includes: functions for targeted direct communications with individual users and groups in multiple locations; situational awareness pinpointing the location and availability of all officers on patrol; lone worker monitoring and protection; emergency management tools; and shuttle tracking so students know when the next campus shuttle will arrive.

The SafeZone technology makes it easy for officers to communicate with individual users directly and silently if needed – and lets Texas A&M University-San Antonio Police Department share information, alerts and warnings with other individuals and groups in specific locations across the campus.

Assistant Chief of Police Roger Stearns says the SafeZone technology is now streamlining operations and allowing more effective team working between his officers and the volunteer responders who help as part of the CERT initiative.

One of the key benefits of the OmniGuard app is that officers get the alert at the same time as dispatch, meaning that they can be en route to the location of the emergency while dispatch is exchanging information with the caller, speeding their response. The added accuracy of the indoor positioning solution helps officers to respond even faster. And the incident commanders can use the system dashboard to verify the location and availability of officers and volunteers, allowing them to more effectively coordinate the response to any incident.

With SafeZone Command, campus police can also monitor and adjust patrol patterns using heat map technology to see where their teams are, and are not, patrolling. In addition, the ability to playback any incident and analyze the availability and location of all resources at each moment serves as a great training tool, which will enhance future performance.