SAFE ZONE
Safe Zone
A TECH SOLUTION TO MITIGATE LOSS OF LIFE
Mike Anderson, Safe Zone president and co-founder, talks to Casino International about the innovative Safe Zone gunfire detection and alert system.
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system that actually alerts authorities within a matter of seconds about the location of a shooter, the type of weapon they have, and the number of shots fired
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happening so we are trying to mitigate the damages and loss of life as much as possible.
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CI: How does SafeZone identify and communicate all of this information? It’s a lot of very specific information that you say the system can gather, how does it work?
MA: It’s a mix of hardware and software. The hardware is a small device, maybe 30-35mm on one side, triangular, and it goes pretty much unnoticed once it’s installed. We use a mix of acoustic and infra-red sensors and we detect an acoustic signature, and infra-red of the muzzle flash to determine the type of weapon. From that we can ascertain which room it was fired in – we are an indoor system – and we then send that data up to a machine learning algorithm on a server, so we can analyse that information and determine what kind of weapon it is. That information is then sent to the authorities.
42 SEPTEMBER 2019
t’s a sad reality that such a device is arguably a necessity, but it’s true. Safe Zone is a device which can tell you if there has been gunfire, its location, and possibly even what kind of weapon has been used. Safe Zone president and co-founder Mike Anderson talked us through
the system.
Casino International: Mike, tell us about Safe Zone please…
…we have developed a
Mike Anderson: We believed that getting first responders to events where active shooters are can save lives; to that end, we have developed a system that actually alerts authorities within a matter of seconds about the location of a shooter, the type of weapon they have, and the number of shots fired. The world has some crazy things going on and I don’t know that you could prevent such things
ACCURACY CI: How accurate is the information?
MA: It’s very high. We do report probabilities. With acoustics and other variables being what they are you can’t have 100 per cent certainty, so we will report a confidence level and they are usually above 95 per cent. Large rooms with a lot of echo might affect that confidence level, it could be as low as 90-91 per cent.
CI: You say it can suggest the likely location of shots… If I have an integrated resort, with many thousands of rooms, would that mean one SafeZone in each room and if so, is the location of the incident determined by the device nearest the shooting or are multiple devices used for triangulation – and potentially greater accuracy?
MA: It’s proximity. But one thing that we do that is unique in the industry is that we report from all the devices in the proximity of the event. The data from all the detectors within earshot report, and all that data is analysed together as a single dataset; that gives us a lot more accuracy and reliability because we are analysing data from multiple detectors at the same time around the same event.
CI: What about multiple events happening simultaneously?
MA: Then you get alerts from different locations, so you will actually see two locations shown on the floorplan in the alert. It’s very rare in these events that a shooter fires only one shot, so by the time we get two data points our confidence level goes way up.
INSPIRATION
CI: Where did the idea for this come from, what was your inspiration?
MA: My background is automation and control and I have always designed and developed those kinds of systems. We were actually developing an energy management and control
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