PBA partners with community organizations to create accessible emergency communications.

Public Broadcasting Atlanta (PBA) remains focused on its mission to serve the community by partnering with Georgia Tech’s Wireless Emergency Communications (WEC) project to make emergency alerts more accessible to people with disabilities.

Hosting a field test for new prototype wireless emergency alerting communications software, PBA recognized the importance of this community project and how it aligned with its vision of implementing a Local Education Network System (LENS), which is capable of convening individuals, organizations and communities. MetroCast Atlanta, a component of LENS, would serve as an emergency information network for schools, city officials and citizens in the event of natural or terrorist disaster.

"This partnership will enable PBA to extend its services to all segments of the community under LENS," said Milton Clipper, president and CEO of PBA. "I am looking forward to this new service becoming a vital national resource for citizens with disabilities."

Researchers at Georgia Tech’s Wireless Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) who run the WEC project were pleased with the results: 100 percent of test participants affirmed that the WEC method of sending emergency alerts would be helpful to them.

"This format [could] reach and protect more people with disabilities," commented one test participant. A vast majority of respondents, 81 percent, found it an improvement over how they currently receive emergency alerts, and 94 percent would be interested in a mobile phone alerting service.

Test results also indicated that a majority of test participants currently receive emergency alerts through traditional methods such as TV and/or low-tech methods such as sirens. Consider for a moment how often people are not in front of a television. What kind of emergency information does a siren provide to the average person? What kind of emergency information does a siren provide to a deaf person? Questions such as these led Georgia Tech researchers to design a system to specifically alert people who are deaf, blind, hard of hearing or have low vision.

The field test recruited participants from the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, Atlanta Public School System, the Wireless RERC’s Consumer Advisory Network and the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Subjects were as diverse in their sensory limitations as they were in their technical skill level, ranging from those who were fully deaf or fully blind, to those with enhanced hearing (hearing aid/cochlear implants) or enhanced vision (glasses/contacts).

Most of the deaf participants utilized BlackBerrys for their text communication capability in both their professional and personal lives; people in the deaf and hard of hearing community were early adopters of SMS (text message) technology. Alternately, several other participants identified themselves as infrequent users of mobile technology.

The study worked like this: Georgia Tech sent a series of SMS messages to three different models of the BlackBerry and to Cingular 3125 Smartphones provided to each test participant. WEC engineers simulated the emergency alerts, employing the Common Alerting Protocol, as if they originated from the National Weather Service. For subjects who were blind or had low vision the custom software presented the content of the text alert in an audio format and utilized an eight-second EAS attention signal. For subjects who were deaf or hard of hearing the software featured vibration alarms that differentiate incoming emergency messages from regular text messages.

"The advantage of accessible emergency communications software and devices is that they can reach the user, no matter what their activity or location, with lifesaving information," said Helena Mitchell, executive director of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy at Georgia Tech and project director for WEC. "People with disabilities have the right to expect that the technology they use on a regular basis is capable of providing them with emergency communications and timely warnings and alerts."

The mobile devices used in this field test were the result of a generous donation from Georgia Tech’s WEC industry partners, Research in Motion and AT&T. The next field test is slated for June 2008 at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York. A full report on the field tests is expected to be completed in the fall of 2008, when all the results and user feedback is complete. In the meantime, there are preliminary findings available from the culmination of this most recent field test and the first test conducted at the Georgia Radio Reading Service. For more information on Georgia Tech’s WEC prototype software, go to www.wirelessrerc.org. Primary funding was made possible by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.