nExt generation eMergencY commuNicatiOnS

Project Information

EMYNOS

Grant agreement ID: 653762

DOI

10.3030/653762

Project closed

EC signature date 28 April 2015

Start date 1 September 2015

End date 28 February 2018

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 4 130 493,00

EU contribution

€ 4 130 493,00

Coordinated by

FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EMYNOS (nExt generation eMergencY commuNicatiOnS)

Reporting period: 2017-03-01 to 2018-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Existing emergency systems and 112 services are based on legacy telecommunication technologies, which cannot cope with the rich-media content that are currently used by European citizens in their everyday life. The EMYNOS project designed and implemented a Next Generation communication platform enabling users to use text, audio and video for emergency calls across heterogeneous devices such as PCs, TV sets, mobile devices, AAC and haptic devices.
In the course of the project, we have seen that the migration towards NG112 is progressing, however slowly. This means that EMYNOS was well placed in supporting this migration through a number of technical/scientific results of major socio-economic impact, which can be summarized as:


- Offering an open source standardized NG112 full chain emergency communication testbed for further development and testing
- Integrating the EMYNOS solution with legacy systems showing that the migration can be done smoothly and go through phases
- Providing standards evaluation, guidelines and recommendations to the European Commission on how to further implement NG112 in Europe
- Providing a socio-economic framework, in particular the accommodation of the EMYNOS solution to the needs of persons with disabilities and how the SME partner working on this aspect that generate revenues

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project started by providing a list of requirements and scenarios taking into account existing standards, end users expectations, and technologies (e.g. IoT) being deployed. Accordingly, a two-layer high-level architecture based on the EENA Long Term Definition document and the ETSI specifications in response to the European Commission mandate M493 in terms of caller location determination was proposed. The EMYNOS architecture was in particular disseminated in high impact journals such as the IEEE ComSoc magazine. Most of the components specified in this architecture were integrated and tested either with the EMYNOS end users’ systems or with commercial solutions at the ETSI NG112 plugtests.

In addition to the typical 112 functionalities such as emergency calls identification and routing, the EMYNOS project has also developed a Next Generation eCall and integrated social media data analytics with the emergency call centers. The EMYNOS system supports various media types including audio, video, Instant Messaging, Real Time Text (RTT), and sensor data transmission. These functionalities were essential for the accommodation of EMYNOS to the needs of persons with disabilities which give an advantage to the partner Harpo in positioning itself in the “ICT for persons with special needs” market. This accommodation was reflected, in particular, by the development of APIs enabling the integration of EMYNOS with Assistive Technologies, transmission of disability profiles to the PSAPs, and use of symbol languages.

Another important achievement in EMYNOS was the implementation of several location configuration mechanisms based on IETF and ETSI standards (LLDP-MED (Layer 2), DHCP (Layer 3), HELD (Layer 7)). Location by value and location by reference were also considered in addition to the use of CellID and WiFi based location. These mechanisms were integrated with native VoIP clients, WebRTC enabled browsers, and are available as open source for further development and testing. For the call routing, two implementations were offered: one based on the LoST protocol, and the other one on the EC mandate 493 which is an extension of the HELD protocol. The related results were published in the Elsevier International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection. Emergency calls using WiFi based location is a promising solution particularly in indoor situations. This solution was validated through joint tests between EMYNOS and the Swedish company Combain.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress beyond state-of-the-art (SoTA)

The EMYNOS project has produced an open-source working prototype for the emergency services through standardized protocols. To the best of our knowledge, the EMYNOS framework is the only existing testbed that is open source and provides a full NG112 communication chain. EMYNOS has also introduced a combination of WebRTC and SIP achieving the first open implementation of a full web-based emergency client using native browser APIs only.


Socio-economic impact

The EMYNOS project has created positive social and economic impact on the European member states. The assessment is based on the following points,

1. The number of components that were developed or extended
2. Platform neutrality and its integration capability with existing products and systems
3. System scalability and its potential for future upgrades
4. Diversity of targeted groups and the end-users that can be addressed
5. Business potentiality and market exploitation of the individual components


The socio-economic impact of EMYNOS can be summarized as follows,

- A list of EMYNOS socio-economic key components that can be exploited (we refer to D5.2 for more details), including their positioning in the market and the potential competitors (Points: 1, 2)
- APIs that were developed in order to enable Assistive Technologies and products to be extended for supporting the needs of persons with disabilities (Points: 2, 3, 4)
- Demonstration platforms that are available at academic/research partners’ premises (i.e. Fraunhofer Fokus, and TEIC), offering experimentation and test-bed facilities to potential end-users, as well as consultancy services (Points: 2, 5)
- Integration of EMYNOS socio-economic components with ready available systems provided by EMYNOS SMEs partners (i.e. Harpo and MCS), in order to add new offerings to their portfolios (Points: 2, 3, 5)
- Turksat is further investigating the integration of the EMYNOS framework with their eGov App and how it could be monetized (Points: 2, 3, 5)



The EMYNOS project has also created positive social effects on European member states especially that,

- It raised awareness about NG112 adoption. Indeed, the components produced by EMYNOS were integrated at ARC and STS premises, for performance evaluation tests and for demonstrating to the public how NG112 services look like. From these show-cases, it was clear that there is,
. definitely a need for other media types (video, text)
. a need for video in one direction only
. a need for better location accuracy

- Showed the importance of including new media types in emergency communication and identified the need of integrating them with social media platforms (outcomes of a meeting with the emergency community at the EENA conference and the Madrid workshop).
- Proved that backwards compatibility with legacy systems is feasible, especially when EMYNOS components are integrated with existing PSAP operation systems that are capable of receiving IP based emergency calls
- Showed the capacity of EMYNOS in accommodating people with disabilities requirements for accomplishing emergency calls. More specifically, partner Harpo has extended its solutions to enable emergency calls to the persons with disabilities. Results from this pilot indicated that the shown functionalities were positively perceived by the end users since they are easy to use, and increase the feeling of safety and comfort.

EMYNOS high level architecture