"Harnessing Technology for School Safety: An Exclusive Interview with Our Director of Technology"

Hey Rob, could you introduce yourself and explain your current role with ELi?

I'm Director of Technology at ELi Technology Inc. With over 35 years of international experience in tech leadership, I try to bring a unique perspective to the role. My responsibilities are broad and evolving, but a major focus is ensuring our technology stack is scalable, robust, and always improving. Location technology is really fast-paced with many stakeholders, so innovation is critical. I also oversee daily operations and manage our development team, driving best practices and fostering a culture of innovation.

Can you provide a brief synopsis on the ATLS Location Service and why it's so crucial to school safety?

In the event of an emergency at a school, or anywhere else for that matter, time is of the essence – life and death in many cases.? ATLS Location Services is a SaaS designed to integrate into safety applications, incident management or critical communication platforms. It delivers precise and accurate location awareness that can be visualized on an indoor floor plan in real-time. ATLS can then distribute that information to those who need it such as 9-1-1, school security or safety officers or incident managers.

ATLS allows users to visualize where any incident or emergency is taking place and relays that location information as a “readable dispatchable address”.?

It also facilitates great features like mass reunification after a school evacuation. Getting people “out” in an emergency is a huge challenge, but keeping people notified, accounting for numbers and bringing people back together are also critical. Supporting reunification means ATLS, gives parents and school stakeholders the ability to quickly reconnect with children quickly.

We understand that there have been some recent upgrades to ATLS? Can you provide an overview on those?

We’ve recently made some exciting changes to ATLS, to increase our location data accuracy, improve its scalability and the ease of use for our partners and end customers.

What specific changes have you made??

We improved our location resolution by introducing a ground-breaking technique using what ELi calls “ELi Anchor Points”, or EAPs. There were previously some limitations on indoor dispatchable addresses, and this upgrade overcomes those.

What technologies or methodologies were employed in these upgrades?

We developed a methodology called “ERL”, or ELi Refined Location”. Combining this with our other well-established patented techniques, we now confidently locate callers to within 9 feet.

Previous ATLS versions provided one dispatchable address per Wi-Fi access point (AP).? However, certain building structures that affect Wi-Fi signals can make this confusing because a caller could be within a range of several rooms or APs and the dispatchable address would not have always lined up.? This level of accuracy wasn’t good enough for us.

Our “ELi Anchor Points” are now plotted within an indoor space, to provide far greater accuracy in the dispatchable address.? For example, in a dense commercial office with many small offices, cubicles and meeting rooms, we now offer a 1:1 relationship with rooms and dispatchable addresses.? It’s awesome, and no one else is doing this.

What motivated these recent upgrades? Were they driven by customer feedback, technological advancements, or regulatory requirements?

The short answer is ‘Yes’ to all!? We’ve received lots of great customer feedback on the UI, plus requests for additional feature support.

The technology we were leveraging had been around for a while, known as Wi-Fi “Round Trip Time or RTT”. We knew that a few meters distance variance indoors is the difference between someone being in the school office or a classroom. That’s significant and can cause delays in emergencies. Wi-Fi RTT was added to the Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 protocol in 2016. The purpose of Wi-Fi RTT is to allow devices to measure the distance to nearby Wi-Fi routers and determine their indoor location with an accuracy of a few meters.

Commercial applications are just starting to leverage this.? ELi are constantly doing R&D to improve our accuracy and stay ahead of the pack.?

Plus regulatory requirements, like Ray Baum Act and Alyssa’s Law in the US drive us to stay committed. This is life-saving technology. We are leading the industry with respect to what is possible.? It’s all about saving lives and finding people as quickly as possible.

How have these upgrades improved the accuracy and reliability of ATLS?

In RTT-capable networks we are now reliably returning a location accuracy of sub 9 feet.? We also achieve floor-level or vertical location accuracy in the 95th percentile currently, with that number moving to 100% with our next version release.

Are there specific metrics or examples that demonstrate these improvements?

Yes – we have performed extensive testing to prove our accuracy and compare it to other services and technologies.? We have a report that can be shared showing detailed results.

Can you explain if there are any new features or capabilities that have been added with the latest upgrades?

We recently incorporated an optional floorplan service into ATLS, allowing our customers (schools or schools districts) to configure and visualize their indoor spaces more easily. Customers can accurately overlay floorplans directly on to a Google Map and manage their access points with a geospatial arrangement function, effectively pulling their APs to wherever they're physically located. This is available for single buildings or multiple. These floorplans are also embedded meaning our partners (application or platform providers) can effortlessly integrate and display these layouts in their own apps if they wish. This saves them development time and effort. It's all about providing our customers and partners more control and clarity.

How do these new features benefit your users?

We found that several customers struggled with creating a floorplan component within their applications that allow for visualization of user location.? We have now created a floorplan service that customers can consume as an API, eliminating the need for them to grind through the development of their own.? This reduces cost and greatly speeds time to market for our partners.

How do the recent upgrades impact the scalability of ATLS? And how do they measure up to your competitors?

With this current release, ATLS has again improved scalability by streamlining the end customer onboarding process.? Features such as the click and drag for WiFi access point geospatial placement, as well as auto-fill for building addresses, makes creating an accurate, referenceable floor plan a breeze.? This allows large scale deployments to happen quickly and efficiently regardless of the size i.e.) airport or stadium.

Scalability was baked into our design from day one.? The ATLS portal as an example which allows partners and customers in deploy very large numbers of schools in a very short time. We employ several AI-based techniques to assist and automate deployment.?

What’s next for ATLS? Where do you see the technology going in the future?

We'll continue to push the envelope and redefine what is possible with respect to accuracy and indoor positioning, to add more value, supporting features such as reunification practices which are critical.? We'll also be leveraging AI particularly for automating deployment in large scale indoor spaces such as stadiums and conference centers. You should expect to see a lot more of ELi Inc and ATLS in the next 12 months.