October 02, 2004
A friend in need
Some of you will have seen yesterday’s announcement that Tony Blair has a dicky ticker. One of the BBC correspondents had the same condition, and recounts his ailments thus:
I was woken up in the middle of the night by a racing heartbeat, sweating heavily and feeling slightly faint. […] My symptoms had stabilised, but as I read about shooting pains in the arm and shortness of breath I started feeling worse again. My heart was racing at about 200 beats per minute, and I was definitely feeling faint.
Of interest is the following vignette:
Bemused and slightly shaken, I went to my computer and immediately asked Google what were the symptoms of a heart attack.
(This is all very British, not wanting to disturb anyone by calling an ambulance. By now, any self-respecting American would have called two ambulances, a cardiologist, their insurance comany and a lawyer. And probably put up a web site to tell their fiends and solicit sympathy. But I digress, enough of stereotypes…)
Clearly something pretty profound has happened here. The Internet has become an emergency response service without being invited.
Any human disaster can be defined along two axes: the scope, and the severity. Putting my consultant hat on and whipping together the inevitable 2×2 matrix, it looks something like this.
Now let’s look at the patterns of communication that occur behind each of these types of disruption.
Suppose you have a minor ailment, miss a plane, break something at home. It’s up to you to do something about it. You go to the doctor, book a new flight, order a new plate. The type of communication is a one-to-one and is initiated by the user. The system is totally decentralised. There is no grand authority to call that says “if you have a mishap, call 0800-4BIGBRO and we’ll tell you what to do next”. Although it’s probably a good basis for an amusing sci-fi book or movie.
When a mass inconvenience occurs, we see a different pattern. Consider a blocked motorway, an ailment sweeping the country, a train strike. You generally learn about these through broadcast media (even if relayed through interactive means such as the web). You tailor your response accordingly. So the information dissemination is centralised, and the reaction is decentralised.
The familiar emergency response system has a different pattern again. When you call for an ambulance, you call a central switchboard and are dispatched a centrally-controlled emergency vehicle. The conversation is one-on-one. (Don’t confuse geographic dispersion with decentralised control. Not the same thing.)
But as we scale this scenario, we end up in the four horsemen of the telepolcalypse upper-right quadrant. Big disasters don’t work well today, if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase. One traffic accident or plume of smoke can cause a torrent of identical calls from mobile phone users, gumming the system up. If you have a chemical leak or approaching hurricane, you need a different soft of pattern. You need to target populations of people, instruct them, and receive feedback on what’s happening on the ground. Chaos and confusion may be natural consequences of the unexpected, but are not inevitably so.
An assumption in many discussions about VoIP is that emergency service calling must be transferred over from the PSTN. You have to ask yourself, is this the right thing to do? If people are turning to Google when they have symptoms they believe could presage a heart-attack, something’s up. People are assembling their own ad-hoc response systems. IP services and VoIP give you flexibility to do something new.
Will anyone take on the challenge of a 21st century public safety system that takes account of this new communications reality? How do we combine the power and flexibility of decentralised mobile and pervasive communications with the power of central intelligence and control?
Perhaps you should ask Tony Blair. After all, he has to worry about all four quadrants these days.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:24 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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