RNLI and Active Web Solutions scoop BCS Mobile Award for
Sea Safety system
The 2006 winner of the Mobile Computing Award, sponsored by
Rainier PR, is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and
Active Web Solutions for their collaborative project, the RNLI Sea
Safety tracking system.
With about 30 fishermen a year losing their lives in UK and
Irish waters, the fishing industry continues to be one of the most
hazardous of occupations.
The RNLI, a charity providing 24-hour lifesaving services in
those waters, wanted to improve safety on small fishing vessels by
introducing a new automatic system that would immediately alert the
search and rescue authorities whenever a vessel found itself in
serious difficulties.
Often, small crafts are not registered as missing until family
or friends report that a boat has failed to return to shore. This
could be many hours after an incident, by which time the crew could
be lost.
The RNLI wanted a system that would give its search and rescue
operations an accurate location of vessels at sea and automatically
alert them if a crew member fell overboard.
Having previously worked with Active Web Solutions, the RNLI
decided to work together again to develop a system from
scratch.
The first system of its kind to combine a man-overboard
function, vessel-overdue monitoring and two-way communications with
the search and rescue services, Sea Safety provides a wireless
personal safety device for crew members.
Using a low-cost satellite communications system, search and
rescue services are then alerted quickly - typically within one
minute - when a crew member goes overboard.
The system also regularly reports a vessel's position, course
and speed. Two-way communications allow the search and rescue
services to communicate with the vessel in distress to let them
know that help is on the way.
The system significantly reduces the time taken to locate a
vessel in trouble at sea from several days to a few minutes.
Michael Vlasto, RNLI operations director, says, "It will actively
assist in preventing needless loss of life at sea and help to take
the search out of search and rescue."
This has undoubtedly been the RNLI's year in the BCS Awards. As
well as the Mobile Computing Award, the project has won the coveted
BT Innovation Flagship Award for Technology plus the Technology
Award for Systems, sponsored by IBM.
BCS president Nigel Shadbolt says, "I think we are all in awe of
the inspirational work of the RNLI. That its world-class
collaboration with Active Web Solutions has resulted in three BCS
awards is extraordinary, but then the RNLI is an extraordinary
organisation."
The category attracted a wide range of projects and three other
organisations gained medallist status, including the Beef and Sheep
Company and Graham Technology, which together found a highly
innovative solution to the paperwork burden of recording
information around lambing by creating a PDA-based system. It
allows farmers to immediately record ID, gender, date of birth,
sire, natural birth and so on, and has successfully removed the
need for paper.
London Waste won a medal for a product that became one of the
first commercial uses of Google Earth. The waste management company
wanted a vehicle tracking system that included phone service,
online access to location data, remote immobilisation for stolen
vehicles and data transfer to third-party products. The
medal-winning system meets all the company's objectives by using a
ruggedised in-vehicle unit with SMS messaging.
In common with most budget-conscious organisations, the Royal
Hospitals Trust in Belfast is constantly looking for new ways of
doing more with less.
As its wireless network became increasingly difficult to manage,
it resolved to develop a stable, reliable and secure materials
management system - limited shelf life makes good stock management
an imperative if costs are to be contained.
The first healthcare trust to deploy such a large scale wireless
network, the Royal Hospitals Trust has rolled out a campus-wide
secure network that enables its staff to work anywhere at any time
and improve the services provided to millions of patients.