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Photo: Motorola Solutions
Developing systems for high-stress situations
With the help of some leading experts, Alun Lewis examines strategic issues facing designers and users in harnessing the flood of new technologies continually arriving
T
echnology’s a pretty amazing thing. With Moore’s Law having been ticking away in the background over the last few decades, we’ve seen the processing
power of integrated circuits double roughly every two years. Broadly similar and complementary laws have emerged in other technology areas such as hard disk performance as well as LCDs and LED for cameras and displays. Linking all these, communications technologies have
also progressed in leaps and bounds, squeezing yet more bandwidth out of the finite radio spectrum or fibre and copper cables. Unfortunately, when it comes to fully exploiting all these
developments, the human nervous system still remains much as it has been for the last hundred thousand years or so. While the human brain and its circuitry are extremely malleable, they retain certain characteristic limits that have to be recognized in designing systems – especially those that are going to be used in high-stress situations. At the end of the day – irrespective of how much data we can deliver to the Mark One human eyeball or ear – humans
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have limited bandwidth. And that bandwidth can drop sharply in the kinds of environments that TETRA users often find themselves in. How best can engineers, device designers, applications developers and operations staff ensure that the maximum human-friendly efficiency is extracted from technologies and systems?
Marshalling a response Te issues at stake are far wider than just ensuring that a fireman can operate his handset with gloves on – or that police officers can access and send appropriate data through theirs without navigating endless menus. For a start, the complex nature of modern societies
demands an increasingly integrated response from the emergency services involved in many incidents. No longer is it enough simply to assign resources from the police, ambulance or fire brigades on a basic triage system of crime, injury or fire and flood. Not only must these resources be marshalled and dispatched in appropriate ways to handle many different
TE TRA TODAY Issue 4 2011
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