This digital location tech could help emergency crews find you in the wilderness

Have you broken your ankle anywhere in Manitoba’s wild wilderness? Did you crash your car on the freeway somewhere outside of Toronto? With the location technology startup What3words, Canadians now have a new way of telling rescue workers exactly where they are – even if they don’t know themselves. Some emergency services in Los Angeles and Arizona are also committed to the technology.

What3words divides the surface of the entire earth into 57 trillion squares with an edge of about 3 meters each. Each patch is then assigned a unique three-word label so that hikers can find a starting point. Postmen can deliver the mail and tourists can find their vacation home. For example, Arizona’s Horseshoe Bend view of the Colorado River is at narrate.optical.carry.

What3words, based in London, offers its service for emergency services free of charge and has convinced more than three quarters of the British emergency services to use it. What3words plans to announce Tuesday. This means that many more people could hear about it, be it from a local fire department asking them to install the app, or by text message during an emergency call.

What3words’ approach is a symbol of how profoundly smartphones can change our lives. Latitude and longitude coordinates have been around for centuries, but they are difficult to use, even when GPS satellites hiss overhead to determine their location. What3words’ approach reduces this position to something that you can easily share in a phone call or text message without being so afraid that the mess of a number describes a completely different point.

“The location of callers is the most important, but in many situations it is the most difficult to find,” said Robert Stewart, head of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials and director of emergency communications in Brandon, Manitoba. Its emergency response operation covers most of the vast area of ​​the Canadian province and half a million people who live outside the largest city of Winnipeg.

Other Canadian forces deploying this technology include the Winnipeg Police Service, the Royal Canadian Mountain Police in North Vancouver, British Columbia, the Halifax Regional Police, Ontario, Wood Buffalo, Alberta, and the Bathurst Police Force, New Brunswick. In the United States, it is being tested by the Los Angeles Fire Department and the Pima County, Arizona fire department has decided to install it after the test.

Find your location faster

People don’t always know where they are when they need to make an emergency call. Street addresses only cover a few areas. It can be difficult for dispatchers to instruct people on how to get their phones to report their longitude and latitude. And the triangulation technology based on communication with cell towers can be miles away.

People often resort to local knowledge – “I’m with Jim, opposite the blue truck” – which is of little use to remote dispatchers, said Stewart.

“When it comes to finding the location of people who have had a heart or respiratory event, someone who has fallen and has a broken leg or is bleeding, seconds make a big difference,” added Derrick Clark, chief of fire, the city Oshawa east of Toronto.

His crews sometimes hunted in a park for 20 or 30 minutes to find a caller. What3words reduces search time to just seconds, he said. He also researches the service as useful for highways emergency callers.

Tap a text message to find your location

By integrating What3words into the emergency response software, dispatchers can send a text message with a What3word hyperlink to a caller. Tapping the link opens a website where the dispatcher displays the three-word location that they can read.

“It’s so easy to use and so easy,” said Clark. Use is free of charge for consumers.

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You can also download the app in advance so that the phone app can determine your location even if the data connection is poor. Rescue workers will encourage people to install it, although it is not necessary.

What3words was easy to integrate with the Oshawa shipping system, which took about four weeks after the decision was made, said Sandra Mackey, the communications officer who monitored the change.

However, What3words has to convince the emergency services that it is worth relying on the technology. It is not an open standard like latitude and longitude. However, for emergency services that integrate the service, it works locally, so it’s not a problem not to reach What3words’ servers.

Google competition

What3words is not alone in its drive to improve location sharing technology. The biggest challenger is the company that runs the enormously powerful Google Maps service.

Google builds its Alternative Plus Codes directly into its Google Maps app on Android. Plus Codes combines six alphanumeric characters with a city name or uses only 10 alphanumeric characters. The CNET center can be written as QJP3 + J6, San Francisco or as 849VQJP3 + J6, for example.

Not surprisingly, What3words chief executive Chris Sheldrick doesn’t like it. “I find it confusing to understand only as a consumer,” he said. “It’s complicated to use and remember.”

Google is happy with its approach, which unlike What3words, uses an open source algorithm that anyone can incorporate into their software or service. “Open addressing standards will be crucial to help billions of people around the world who either have no address or one that is difficult to locate,” said spokesman Ben Jose. “As a free, open source addressing system, anyone can immediately use plus codes for any purpose, no matter what language they speak.”

Help with the delivery of pandemics

What3words makes money by billing companies that make heavy use of the user interface. This includes Daimler – navigation systems for newer Mercedes-Benz vehicles understand What3words’ locations – and some hail fighting companies, said Sheldrick.

Rescue adoption could increase the general use of What3words by consumers. This happened in the UK, where people are now using the service for things like delivery, hail and drone flights. Small businesses found it useful when they suddenly had to do deliveries like that Coronavirus pandemic kept customers away from shops and restaurants. What3words use for e-commerce increased 833% when protection advice was introduced.

“We are learning what the ideal What3words ecosystem looks like,” said Sheldrick. “For us, it is about a comprehensive awareness of the consumer.”