Emergency services

24 March 2006

From video-linked ambulances to remote-monitored parking meters, the US is putting wireless technologies to practical use - and opening up a whole new set of applications and services

It's normally lawyers who get labelled as ambulance chasers, but in the city of Tucson, Arizona, wireless providers are now picking up the mantle.

Work is underway to build a wireless network that will link ambulances to one of the city's hospitals, the University Medical Trauma Center, providing video links between doctors in the Emergency Room and crews on the streets. Paramedics will be able to transmit pictures of patients as they're transported to hospital, along with blood pressure readings, electrocardiogram data and other vital statistics. Hospital-based specialists will use that information to give the crews treatment advice, effectively putting a virtual doctor in the back of the bus. If you've ever watched 'ER' or 'Casualty' and listened to the incomprehensible medical babble exchanged between doctors, nurses and paramedics when an ambulance pulls up, you'll appreciate that early transmission of detailed information could come in handy.

One of the more practical examples of wireless technology in action, the Tucson project suggests that specialists in this field will have their work cut out in years to come. City-wide wireless networks are popping up around the world, from London to Philadelphia to Melbourne, designed to provide citizens with internet access either free of charge or on a banded pricing basis. Each of these networks, of course, offers opportunities for creative applications and services.

One of the companies behind the Tucson project, Wireless Facilities Inc (WFI) in San Diego, California, is already getting involved in a number of projects. As well as jointly bidding with Google to build a Wi-Fi network in San Francisco, it's working on a slightly more mundane but equally innovative project elsewhere to connect up parking meters. According to Desmond Wheatley, president of WFI's Enterprise Network Services group, one of the aims is to make parking attendants more productive - instead of driving around the city squinting at flashing 'expired' signals, they'll be notified automatically when individual meters are running out and make their way straight to them. That's bad news for drivers in the short-term - but things will eventually be evened out with another wireless application that will allow them to top up their meter remotely when the time expires, using a credit card and a mobile phone.

Wheatley didn't expand on what will happen when these two applications collide, triggering a battle between the speed of data traffic on a mobile phone (pretty instantaneous) and the speed of traffic wardens on a city street (somewhat less so). It's fair to say that the battle's already lost in San Francisco, however, where parking attendants drive three-wheel vehicles - think old-fashioned milk cart meets Sinclair C5 - and sport bicycle helmets. Many words spring to mind when you see them, but 'leading-edge' and 'high-speed, low latency' aren't among them.

Inevitably, amid all the excitement, there have been words of warning. The city-wide networks are built on mesh systems that pass signals from one antenna to another until they get back to home base, making it easier to provide blanket coverage and providing greater reliability if a node fails. One problem, however, is that standards haven't been agreed for this kind of set-up - so cities could be locking themselves into proprietary networks for years to come. There's also the viability issue - wireless networks take a lot of maintenance, and if the business model doesn't work for the provider, a lot of people could be left in the lurch.

None of this will worry companies like WFI, however, whose work on city grids is simply an extension of its wireless operations elsewhere. Wheatley's team manages the wireless infrastructure for One America Plaza in San Diego, one of the best-known 'intelligent' buildings in the world. It's designed to provide as many services as possible to tenants on a utility basis - so instead of waiting for phone and data lines to be installed when you move into a unit or switch offices, you simply plug into the network and go. The great thing about building big bandwidth into a building is that you can start to run all kinds of services across it. The Voice over IP network has already been expanded to carry CCTV, for example, giving easier central control and allowing security guards to manipulate cameras from handheld devices while they're doing their rounds.

What's most telling about these different applications, of course, is that they demonstrate how creativity can have humble origins. Property infrastructure, security cameras and parking meters may not have been high on your career aspirations when you first went into business - but it looks like they could make you a lot of money.

By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research