AWS Public Sector Blog

AWS Customers Saving Lives with Mobile and IoT Technology

Technological innovation can often save lives or enable rapid intervention in situations where lives are threatened. From responding to gun shots  informing and mobilizing responders on school campuses, to fighting child trafficking, organizations have been able to move rapidly to address pressing societal problems.

The AWS Cloud has allowed teams to be agile and focus more on their missions rather than IT, giving them more time to focus on saving lives. Check out some of our customers who save lives with mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

ShotSpotter – Detect, Locate, and Alert on Gunfire in Under a Minute

ShotSpotter delivers real-time gunshot notifications to law enforcement so they can dispatch to the precise location of the gunshot, engage with the community, look for evidence and occasionally help victims and make arrests. Their goal is to help drive down illegal gun use.

The ShotSpotter solution is an excellent example of the AWS Cloud enabling next generation technology for the public safety community. ShotSpotter turned to AWS because they needed to cover a broad range of technologies, spanning sensor hardware design and embedded software development, classification of gunshots through machine learning, development of algorithms for precisely locating gunshots in a challenging acoustic environment, sensor network management, API development, and front-end technologies for delivering gunshot notifications and analysis.

Hear from Paul Ames, SVP, Products and Technology, at ShotSpotter alongside Kristin Boorse, Senior Product Manager, at Thorn at re:Invent 2016 in this session.

Thorn – Digital Defenders of Children Dedicated to Driving Technology Innovation

Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children is a nonprofit organization dedicated to driving technology innovation. Thorn maintains a vast global network of professionals on the front lines of this issue. They invest in research to better understand emerging trends. Then, they explore new strategies to identify victims, deter predators and disrupt platforms through the innovation lab, hackathons and partnerships. They try things that haven’t been done before, and will risk failure to achieve greater impact from success. When they identify a new approach that has impactful results, they will invest to scale that tool and put it in the hands of those who can deploy it across the country and internationally for broadest reach.

LiveSafe – Mission to Make the World a Safer Place through Crowdsourced Intelligence

LiveSafe, a mobile safety communications platform for crowdsourced intelligence, was born from a spirit of triumph over tragedy and the desire to make the world a safer place. After the mass shootings at Virginia Tech, the founding team saw an opportunity to mobilize and connect people through technology. LiveSafe is putting safety in everyone’s hands to prevent incidents and directly connect people to the help they need. Via the mobile safety app installed on individuals’ smartphones, every submission via text, photo or video is collected with location data to facilitate two-way communication between students and campus security and providing actionable responses from real-time information. Data can also be submitted anonymously, protecting an individual’s identity while still providing critical information to relevant officials.

When considering the technology needed to run mobile apps, LiveSafe looked for scalability, reliability, security, user engagement, and  low cost. Learn more about how the AWS Cloud helps them to scale rapidly during times of instances, like a security threat on campus or at a stadium in this past blog post.

Sri Elaprolu, Global Public Sector IoT Lead at AWS, will lead the “AWS Customers Saving Lives with Mobile and IoT Technology” session with Thorn and ShotSpotter at re:Invent. Sign up for this session here!

 

AWS Public Sector Blog Team

AWS Public Sector Blog Team

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Blog team writes for the government, education, and nonprofit sector around the globe. Learn more about AWS for the public sector by visiting our website (https://thinkwithwp.com/government-education/), or following us on Twitter (@AWS_gov, @AWS_edu, and @AWS_Nonprofits).