If you need help quickly in an emergency, dial 112 in Europe. The call automatically establishes a connection to the nearest rescue control center. If you, as a mobile phone subscriber, are in an overloaded radio cell, other connections in the cell may be severed because an emergency call always has priority. Among other things, the rescue operations control center needs to know the following: What happened? And where exactly is the help needed?
- Where is the event?
- Who is calling?
- What happened?
- How many affected?
- Waiting for questions!
Location designation in case of emergency
Knowing the exact location is important. But not all those seeking help can name their location exactly, i.e. determine their position. Humans are fallible: be it a lack of local knowledge, limited spatial orientation, unmarked paths or impassable terrain. Excitement and stress in an emergency situation, poor audio quality, language difficulties, a sudden end to the conversation before the location is mentioned or other things can lead to incorrect information. Determining the correct location information takes time, which is missing in an emergency. Wrong locations, wrong access routes and mix-ups must be avoided. The Advanced Mobile Location (AML) service can help with newer smartphones.
The idea behind this is as follows: thanks to numerous sensors, mobile devices can often determine their own location fairly well. Applications and services access location information. AML uses this location information to automatically send it to rescue when an emergency call is made.
Thatoffener Standard AML
Advanced Mobile Location is an open source standard for transmitting location data to ensure automatic location. AML is integrated in the smartphone’s operating system, in Android since version 4 and in Apple iOS from version 13.3. So you don’t need to install or activate any additional app. Once you get over that Smartphone dial the emergency number 112, the location service in the smartphone, the determination and transmission of the position via AML is automatically activated in parallel during the communication. Once the position is determined, the smartphone transmits it to an end point via SMS, data SMS (for Android) or HTTPS. The following illustration shows the data transfer process.
The rescue control center (PSAP) can retrieve the data from the AML endpoint. AML remains active only during the call. AML is the result of the EU project “HELP 112”, the aim of which was to transmit caller location data to the emergency dispatch center during a 112 emergency call.
(Image: EENA)
The project was initiated by the European Emergency Number Association (EENA). EENA is a non-governmental organization that aims to improve people’s security and protection. Measures of the EENA range from knowledge transfer to the expansion of better international networking of emergency call processing agencies, the establishment of standards and the modernization of technology and the use of new technologies, which also includes better location determination in emergencies. The history of 112 as an emergency number for quick rescue in Germany and Europe.