Google Teams Up With 911 to Locate Emergency Callers Faster

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Google is putting its mapping expertise to great use, as it teams up with the 911 emergency response service to bring responders over to an emergency caller faster. The company has been working with 911 centers to come up with a system to pinpoint a caller's location using data from their cellphone.

Wireless carrier services are also giving 911 responders a good idea of a caller's location, but Google may have come up with something even more accurate. To prove the new system, the company has teamed up with 50 call centers that serve 911 calls to around 2.4 million residents in Texas, Tennessee and Florida, according to the Wall Street Journal via Engadget.

The results are in, and they are generally very encouraging. RapidSOS, one of the firms involved in the test run, reported that comparing Google's new tech with the current location that wireless carriers give out, Google's system is more accurate over 80 percent of the time.

The data, which is provided via Google's Waze, is also more pinpoint making it more useful for responders rushing to the scene. Carrier data, which tries to determine the caller's location by a combination of techniques involving cell site towers, points to a general area that's around 522 feet or 159 meters on average.

Google's data, which also comes in much faster than those of the wireless carriers, can figure out a location of 121 feet or 36.8 meters, according to Digital Trends. That's a significant difference, especially in urban and indoor emergency sites.

To come up with a location, Google's system uses a combination of information from cell tower data, GPS, and Wi-Fi signals. It's a system that the company has already launched in a number of countries via their Android Emergency Location service.

Aside from location data, Google is also trying to incorporate some context by adding a location card in its app whenever a user makes an emergency call via Android. This card, which is sent to emergency responders in areas that adopts the system, is shown to the user to read out loud and includes a map, GPS coordinates, and location address.