Text by: Caroline Morisot-Pagnon – GNSS Engineer – Telespazio France

Telespazio is developing in collaboration with EENA an emergency service integrated into the WAOW module and based on the PEMEA standard architecture. The PEMEA architecture allows the communication between a mobile application and the Emergency services, through a complex client/server architecture.  The vision of PEMEA is twofold: the application side encompassing the mobile application itself communicating with a dedicated Application Provider server responsible for implementing PEMEA and the PSAP side made of dedicated servers responsible for gathering the data from various Application Provider servers and transmitting it to the PSAPs.  The last release of the standard (v1.2.1 march 2020) provides for the possibility to transfer new types of data between the applications and the PSAPs in addition to the location of the user: medical data, audio or video for instance. The format for transmitting such data is for further study in the standard. Anyway, since the automatic triggering of a medical alert by the WAOW tool is based on the monitoring of the user’s heart bit rate, a specific format was defined to convey this data into the PEMEA messages.

But what do this new types of data transfer imply at PSAPs level? Actually, emergency services need to implement specific platforms and tools to get the best from these information. How to display these data to make it easy to use by the emergency service operator? While it is rather intuitive to display a position on a map like it is done in the WAOW PSAP Web View developed by Telespazio (see picture below), how to represent medical data? And what weight should be given to such data in the decision making? Should these medical data be transformed into a list of required medical equipment? Into an emergency level which would be maximum for a heart attack for instance? Should these information be used to dimension the medical teams size?

Moreover, the provision of video and audio data implies the adjustment of the infrastructure in terms of storage capacity and processing units. Should the PSAP not have the capacities to process this new kind of data, it should inform the Application Provider about its supported capabilities through the standardised acknowledgment message of PEMEA.

Nonetheless, the trend seems to foster the use of such data since NG112, future European Emergency Services, also specifies the sending of video and audio to Emergency Services. And it is sure that all the efforts will be made to maximise the benefits from such progress and help saving more and more lives!

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