Page 36 - Campus Security & Life Safety, March/April 2019

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campuslifesecurity.com | March/April 2019
“With indoor positioning, we're able to provide a
faster response time, whether it's a medical
emergency or an active shooter.” By Sydny Shepard
Indoor Positioning Tech Enhances
Campus Security with 3D View
emerging technology
University installs positioning technology to provide safest environment possible
Texas A&M University-San Antonio (A&M-SA) is a rap- idly expanding campus, with residential facilities and on- campus businesses. With the ever-present risks of crises and emergency situations on university campuses, the A&M- SA Police Department began looking for ways to increase efficiency when it came to campus security. They landed on a advanced technology solution that has never before implemented on a campus: indoor position- ing technology.
From the start of last semester, the police department at A&M-SA began using the indoor positioning technology, which worked through the use of Bluetooth bea- cons installed throughout the campus’ build- ings and open spaces.
The technology is used to help pinpoint
emergencies so that police can respond in a timely manner, eliminating unnecessary incidents. Instead of receiving an alert about a disturbance in the student union building, the A&M-SA police are now given specifics on a potential incident and its location, such as, “on the fourth floor, west wing, outside room 410.”
“With indoor positioning and SafeZone, we’re able to provide a faster response time, whether it is a medical emergency or an active shooter,” says Roger Stearns, A&M- SA’s assistant chief of police.
A Broader Solution
A&M-SA is not alone in adopting the system from CriticalArc. A number of universities in the U.S. and overseas have recently gone down the same route, but A&M-SA is the first university to deploy it campus-wide
instead of targeting it at specific, higher risk locations.
This indoor positioning capability is one feature of a much broader solution, Critica- lArc’s SafeZone, which includes functions for geo-fencing, targeted direct communications with individual users, groups in multiple locations, lone worker tracking and protec- tion, emergency management tools and situ- ational awareness capability. In short, the system has the sort of control-room func- tionality usually only associated with more complex Physical Security Information Man- agement (PSIM) systems.
Older style safety systems can give users geographic positioning system (GPS) coor- dinates, but for any building with more than a single floor this only offers a limited view. By contrast, CriticalArc’s new generation three-dimensional capability is adding a