Transforming Campus Safety with Location Services and Emergency Calling in Your Mobile App

Class ends, it’s dark, and your car is a 15-minute walk away. Shadows become ominous, every other person on the sidewalk is suspect, anxiety builds. You feel threatened! Do you call 911, campus police? How do you explain where you are? An emergency phone kiosk 300 yards away. If it works, you’ll get the police, and they will know where you are, but you are stuck there and vulnerable until the police arrive. During this session we will demonstrate the mobile solution we developed in house and built into the campus mobile app that calls the University of Houston (UH) emergency number and uses geolocation and geofencing to allow the UHPD to track the caller during the call. We will explain how we worked with UHPD, students, local law enforcement, and others to deliver a highly effective emergency calling feature. See behind-the-curtain administration functions and dashboards used by UHPD that go beyond the technology used on most campuses. This demonstration will go far beyond a normal show-and-tell, providing insight on how we worked with key stakeholders from initial conceptualization to testing and deployment, all while saving the university hundreds of thousands of dollars through cost savings and cost avoidance.