Precision Indoor/Outdoor Personnel Location System

This project will continue development and proof of concept demonstration of a practical, deployable, zero infrastructure, precision indoor/outdoor personnel location system for use by law enforcement, firefighters, corrections staff and first responders. This project addresses rapid development of a new technology that includes communications and coordination of application software. It addresses the problem of precise location of lost or injured and unresponsive first responder officials during a crisis. Firefighters could obtain precise directions for exiting an area regardless of visual impairment, or found if incapacitated. Search and rescue teams could obtain 100% search coverage of an area by recording and analyzing rescuer tracks. Hazmat and NTSB teams could precisely tag all contaminants or debris encountered while rapidly continuing to search for items of particular importance. The population which would benefit include 750,000 state, local, and federal law enforcement officers, 1,000,000 firefighters, 380,000 corrections staff, and first responder.
nca/ncf

WPI continues the research and development for a practical, deployable, zero infrastructure, precision indoor/outdoor personnel location system for use by law enforcement, firefighters, corrections staff and other first responders. It builds upon the engineering research that was conducted under the project titled ``Precision Indoor/Outdoor Personnel Location System,'' previously awarded by NIJ/DOJ in 2003 and 2004. The previous two phases of this work developed the basic theory of operation of the system, designed, fabricated, and tested wideband RF and digital signal processing hardware, produced detailed system simulations and analytical predictions of required bandwidth for specific multipath environments, and obtained substantial indoor and outdoor test data under multipath conditions. Test results demonstrated the severity of the indoor environment, necessitating further analytical and experimental work. This work includes investigation of the lower frequency region (below 4 MHz) which is substantially immune to signal reflections as well as a move from the 450 MHz band to the 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz region where greater bandwidth is available. Also, system synchronization will be implemented and the command/control interface will be produced.

nca/ncf