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Introducing FoneFinder ™. What is it? FoneFinder is a chip set that goes into your cellular phone. When you hit the 911 button on your phone it works in conjunction with an onboard GPS receiver to call out your location to the police or EMTs. A Solution to the Personal Safety Crisis. The Problem: The problem of EMS dispatchers locating cellular 911 calls is overwhelming. It is estimated that currently there are 27 million cellular 911 calls annually in the United States. The problem is even worse because it takes at least five minutes to locate the caller. To add perspective to this "cellular dilemma," approximately 10 million cellular phones were sold in the US alone last year and industry sources predict a compound annual growth rate of of 40% to 60%! This has caused the Federal Communications Commission to issue a Report and Order requiring all carriers and cell phone manufacturers to identify the location of 911 calls. The response to the Report and Order has been a flurry of suggestions of systems to solve the problem. With the exception of the FoneFinder system, the proposals are both expensive and require significant infrastructure. Beacon systems cost between $500k and $50k per cell site (to say nothing of of the implementation taking one and one half years to two years per community). Thus these systems are unsuitable to provide immediate assistance to EMS dispatch centers. GPS based systems which are solely digital are either expensive due to utilization of modems or are impractical to implement due to a lack of agreement on format.(Continued) |
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