The EmergiCare team headed to Hack the North Sept. 16-18 with tonnes of curiosity and a measure of outrage: flaws in how emergency 911 systems handle cellphone calls put lives at risk.
“To us, that sounds ridiculous,’’ team spokesperson Kevin Pei said in an interview. “You call Uber and get a car instantly, but 911 can’t find you over 60 per cent of the time? How is this possible?”
The problem is the shaky ability of 911 systems to quickly and accurately locate a caller’s cellphone, particularly when calls come from indoors. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expects carriers to meet at least a 40-per-cent success rate with cellphone 911 locates by 2017.
EmergiCare, made up of Pei and fellow University of Waterloo students Diana Chang, Jeffrey Xiao and Alexandre Cuoci, went to Hack the North with the view that the timeline for improvement does too little, too late.
So the team built a hack, and they built a hack using open data.
Hack the North has been an annual feature of Waterloo Region’s techscape since 2014. This year, it drew more than 1,000 participants from 21 countries and 176 schools. Teams spread themselves over six floors of UW's Engineering 5 building.
Open data — the masses of information churned out by governments and their affiliated agencies, and by businesses that chose to share their information — featured prominently at the event, brought to front of mind by Canada’s Open Data Exchange (ODX) and Communitech.
Fourteen teams took up the challenge to build something with open data.
“It was a great opportunity to introduce open data to some of the world’s best upcoming developers,” said Kevin Tuer, Managing Director of ODX. “I am pleased with the interest open data garnered.”
That uptick, he added, is something ODX can take on the road to other events, to other mashups of established companies and new entrepreneurial thinkers, where ODX promotes the social and commercial opportunities open data offers. EmergiCare won the API (application programming interface) prize that ODX sponsored.
This may not be a done-and-forgotten weekend hack, Pei said.
Buoyed by its success at Hack the North, the team wants to get its solution under the eyes of government authorities who plan and fund 911 systems.
EmergiCare came up with a simple, low-cost hack to feed the phone’s GPS information to 911 operators by text messages generated automatically during a call. The function would exist in an app built into the phone. Software at the 911 centre would capture the locator text messages.
It doesn’t rely on tower positions to, often badly, triangulate the call.
Open data came into the picture at the testing stage. EmergiCare couldn’t use live emergency data showing the position of nearby police cars to simulate an incident. But it was able to model a response based on bus-location open data from Grand River Transit.
“The way I position open data is that it is the easiest way to connect your hack to the outside world, to have a hack that is about something, whether these are places or people or services,” said Joseph Bou-Younes, ODX’s Data Executive-in-Residence. "The beauty of open data is that in most cases you don’t need anybody’s permission to use it. It’s open. It’s a file or collection of files sitting on a website.”
Hacks from other teams using open data did such things as provide farmers with information about soil conditions and commodity pricing; and families with suggestions about places to live.
About 200 teams took part in Hack the North this year. The youngest participant was 13. Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures, was the event’s keynote speaker.
Hack the North crowd-sourced topics for its late-night talks. Open data surfaced as a popular choice. Teams that opted to experiment with open data during the hackathon napped well in Star Wars-themed sleeved blankets.
“We made open data cool,” said Saj Jamal, Communitech’s Vice-President of Marketing and Product Development. “They can actually build things from it. There is something here with which you can actually change the world.”
