28-07-2025
Streamlined alert systems could improve disaster and emergency response
BlackBerry's AtHoc platform sends notifications to relevant personnel in the field via email, SMS, or mobile app, doing away with having to individually contact key stakeholders or manually identify who is closest and available to respond to incidents like widespread fires or sudden floods. — BlackBerry
Picture this: a natural disaster or major emergency strikes, and emergency services – police, fire, medical, and so on – need to be mobilised at the drop of a hat. In times like these, every second counts.
Wading through call trees to find the right person in charge, who then has to repeat the process down the chain before the message is finally filtered to first responders on the ground, who then need to race to the scene to make up for lost time.
According to Chris Ullah, BlackBerry's emergency services global business development lead, this has been a major bugbear when it comes to getting rapid mobilisation whenever there's a major incident.
Ullah, a former police superintendent with Greater Manchester police in the UK, draws from his experience in the field, saying that it comes down to getting the right information to the right people as quickly as possible.
"In all my service, whenever I've been involved in a major or critical incident, in debriefs and reviews afterwards, communication has always been at the top as being criticised or being a challenge," he says, adding that the police then considered a better solution than just picking up the phone and manually calling personnel one by one.
This is where a solution like BlackBerry's AtHoc enters the picture, which serves as a secure critical event management platform to share information during major incidents, which Ullah says can cut down response times from over an hour down to just two minutes.
Such a platform, which sends notifications to relevant personnel in the field via email, SMS, or mobile app, would do away with having to individually contact key stakeholders or manually identify who is closest and available to respond to incidents like widespread fires or sudden floods.
"The old way of doing it would actually be: start picking up the phone, going down a phone tree, ringing people up one after the other.
"Now, you can just send out an alert to all officers, maybe of a particular skill set or by location, asking 'are you able to return back to duty?', with a yes or no as a response," he says.
For instance, an alert for 50 officers with a specific skill set might be sent out, and the first 50 who respond as available can be designated to report in. Once that quota is filled, the system will automatically send a cancellation notice to everyone else.
BlackBerry's AtHoc solution has already seen widespread use in the UK for crisis communication, with over 2,000 organisations having deployed it. It has also seen use during major international forums with world leaders in attendance, such as the Group of Seven (G7) summit.
It also includes geofencing, which is the ability to designate an area of interest on a map. This could be used to indicate a disaster has occurred at a particular location, which would then send a notification to the device belonging to law enforcement, emergency services, or rescue personnel near the geofenced area.
A system like this also would not be limited to emergency response, but also act as support for day-to-day operations, such as managing which officers are on duty in specific areas.
Officers can also receive notifications when entering burglary-prone neighbourhoods, geofenced zones for welfare checks on domestic abuse victims with protection orders, or areas where individuals under court-imposed curfews are being monitored.
