Sensors Revolutionizing Safety

In Grand Rapids, MI there is a large effort going forward to anticipate and prevent repetition of some of this country’s latest tragedies. Along with body cameras, racial equity and bias training the city is looking into a relatively simple system of sensors that would serve the function of recording and communicating the location of gunshots to proper city authorities.

 These sensors would be placed in ideal locations around the city, so that at any moment if a gunshot occurs there will be more than one sensor picking up the sound and working with the other sensors to triangulate it’s origination. This GPS data (along with the audio) will then be sent to the officers and police station so that they might better lend assistance to those who may be in harms way. It will require about 15-20 sensors for each sq. mile, and about 80 cities in the US are currently using the system.

As we step into the next generation of technology it will be important that we remember to apply the technology to not only make things smaller, faster, cheaper but also to make them safer.

To read more about the ShotSpotter sensor system, click here->

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2015/03/shotspotter_part_of_grand_rapi.html