Episode 187: Navigating Safety: Innovation at the Frontline with Michael IIsbroux

Episode notes

How can you use your smartphone as a safety tool?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

Thanks for joining our 16 part FRST Challenge Mini Series recorded at the competition! Tracking and situational awareness has long been a problem for first responders. That's why the FRST Challenge competition is designed to pinpoint 3D tracking technologies that provide one-meter accuracy for first responders in indoor environments, crucial for enhancing their safety during rescue operations.

The 6 finalist teams competed in localization and ruggedization tests at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center from October 23-27, 2023. Winning teams gain access to funding, business support, and live field testing opportunities to evolve their solutions for real-world application.

In this episode:

The importance of privacy-protected location intelligence for worker safety

Discover wearable tech solutions that offer safety for first responders and industry workers

Learn how Epic Blue’s Guardian app is transforming smartphones into advanced safety tools

Hear from Michael IIsbroux - the Co-founder and CEO of Epic Blue .

Epic Blue is a Belgian software company specialized in inertial navigation technology for people in GPS-denied environments.

With Guardian, they launched the most advanced Lone Worker Safety application for localization, alerting and critical communication. Powered by their award-winning indoor positioning technology, Guardian is a trusted solution by industry leaders and first responders all over the world.

So click play now to hear what he has to share, and stay tuned for the rest of our mini series!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro
2. 1:14 Meet Michael IIsbroux of Epic Blue
3. 1:21 How phase five went
4. 2:46 A healthy level of tension
5. 2:53 Designing for fire, law and EMS
6. 4:12 Everyone moves differently
7. 4:54 Indoor positioning as a business
8. 5:59 Working with partners in Singapore
9. 7:03 Culture and market integration
10. 8:13 What caught his attention this week
11. 9:29 Putting the problem before the technology
12. 10:51 Final thoughts
13. 11:35 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is the FRST Challenge and what was tested in Phase 5?

The FRST Challenge aims to produce marketable prototypes that demonstrate indoor localization tracking of first responders within one meter accuracy without any pre-deployed infrastructure. Phase 5 increased the challenges from Phase 4 by including multiple responders, longer durations, and longer distances.

Hear it at 0:00

How does Epic Blue's tracking system work?

Michael IIsbroux says their system is fundamentally inertial first and will use GPS if available. It can be placed anywhere on the body without imposing a certain location, which he says is important for usability and user adoption.

Hear it at 1:24

Why does Epic Blue allow the tracker to be worn at different body locations?

Michael IIsbroux explains that different first responders have different needs. Police officers have belts full of equipment so they place the tracker on their bulletproof vest, while firefighters and EMS may wear it on the belt. The flexibility helps serve any kind of mission or service.

Hear it at 3:15

What advice does Michael IIsbroux give to entrepreneurs developing technology for first responders?

It is important to reverse the usual engineering process. Instead of putting technology first and finding a solution, find a real problem that exists in the public safety space and get honest feedback from stakeholders. Listen first on how they want to use the technology, where they want to place it, and what usability factors matter, then derive the technical solution from that.

Hear it at 10:03

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 187 transcript

Navigating Safety: Innovation at the Frontline with Michael IIsbroux

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Michael IIsbroux

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new Smart Firefighting mini-series created during the phase five of the FRST Challenge, hosted at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center. The FRST Challenge focus is to produce marketable prototypes that demonstrate indoor localization tracking of first responders within one meter accuracy without any pre-deployed infrastructure. Many of you heard stories from phase four, and here in phase five, the challenges were increased by including multiple responders, longer durations, and longer distances. In these conversations, you will hear from many of the entrepreneurs, first responders, and team members involved that address these challenges and opportunities of X, Y, and Z axis tracking from multiple perspectives around scalability, usability, affordability, and more. This challenge is administered by the Indiana University Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab and funded by the NIST Public Safety Communication Research PSCR Division. Also, consider putting the NIST 5x5 Conference on your calendar, located in Chicago, June 25th to 27th, 2024. Enjoy this deep dive into first responder tracking technology, and please reach out with your thoughts. We're deep into the FRST Phase 5 miniseries, alongside Michael IIsbroux from Epic Blue. Michael, how you doing?

[1:19] Michael IIsbroux: Doing well. Thanks, Kevin.

[1:21] Kevin Sofen: So how has Phase 5 been going for you?

[1:24] Michael IIsbroux: It's been amazing. I think compared to phase 4, the challenges that were laid out for us increased almost exponentially in terms of complexity and realism. I think our system behaved really well, especially because now we're tracking multiple firefighters at the same time. Tomorrow is the result. Normally we should know about the results, but what also is very interesting is the togetherness of the different teams. Everybody, all the teams try to solve this each with his own technologies, his own philosophy. Some of them are very complementary. So that's also one of the things and the takeaways we have from this Phase 5. In between Phase 4 and Phase 5, we focused a lot on refining our engine, our AI engine, to be able to track different kinds of movements. What we learned from Phase 4 were put into practice for Phase 5, and now we're seeing the benefits of the work that we did. that we did. Fundamentally, our system is about inertial first. If we have GPS, we'll use the GPS. Our system is also about being able to place it anywhere you want to on your body without imposing a certain location, which is very important for usability and user adoption of such a solution. So yeah, the whole week has been great. Sometimes very tense, but mostly very cordial between all the players.

[2:46] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, there's been a healthy level of tension and angst and respect in the air.

[2:51] Michael IIsbroux: Absolutely, it's right phrasing.

[2:53] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, it's been fun to see it, feel it. And this time I noticed, I mean, it was similar in phase four, but especially in phase five, seeing first responders from fire, law, and EMS sort of, and those maybe even kind of explain optically sort of what your tech looks like. But how did you sort of think and address and design for the different subsets of public safety?

[3:15] Michael IIsbroux: Well, it's a good question. It plays into the fact that our approach is that we can serve any kind of mission, any kind of service. A firefighter will want to wear the device at a different location compared to a police officer because a police officer has a belt and it's already full of equipment. So you're not gonna attach our tracker to the belt, but mostly to the vest, to the bulletproof vest. And this is something that they really appreciated, the flexibility, because we arrived on site, we saw that they couldn't put it on the belt, they immediately placed our tracker on the vest and they could go and we could track them in 3D inside the buildings. EMC, of course, they have much more liberty on where they want to track, put the device themselves. So they're simply put it on the belt and then just walk away. There's no need to calibrate or anything. And it's also very easy to give our device to another person. So you want to be tracked, and you take the device for your colleague, and you don't need any calibration, just to start and then do the walk around what you need.

[4:12] Kevin Sofen: Great, yeah, I mean, it's a challenge, but they all move different, they all have different objectives, But nonetheless, it's still important to know, where are my people at? And then ultimately being able to get that information out. So if something happens, we're really understanding the operation better, just to make everything more effective. So there's a lot of these different teams here. There's the awards ceremony tomorrow. It's October 20, 2023. What's next? I mean, obviously, hoping for the best tomorrow. But nonetheless, I know your team is going to be active and continue to develop and iterate. How are you taking some of the lessons learned here and applying that towards ultimately moving towards some type of commercialization?

[4:54] Michael IIsbroux: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, indoor positioning is really a bread and butter. And this is what we focus on. It's what we want to do for different kind of verticals, first responders, private industry. So after the challenge, we'll take what we learned and refine the positioning engine which we have. And then on the one hand, start deploying this in our wearable, which is called Shine, but also on the other hand, an important aspect for us is to be able to use smartphones only, because a lot of smartphones are there in the market. And they use the same positioning engine, either being driven by our wearable or being driven by the smartphone sensors. Not every first responder needs the high-end capabilities and needs a specific wearable that can track them at one meter level accuracy. There's a lot of smartphones available being used by first responders, So why not give them the capabilities to be localized, indoors, outdoors, being sure that even if there's GPS available, you have a stable GPS signal. And that's what lies ahead for us, both in the US and Europe and in Asia. This is where we see our greatest growth in terms of deployment and scalability.

[5:59] Kevin Sofen: That's exciting. And I see you have your other two team members there and you're based out of Belgium, correct? Yeah, correct. You mentioned Asia as well. Are you working with first responders there or what are those conversations like?

[6:12] Michael IIsbroux: Yeah, we're very fortunate to have a good partner in Singapore is like a central location for Southeast Asian business. He's well-connected with local firefighters teams and also with security teams and private industry. So there we're running a couple of POCs to have them evaluate and look at that technology, but also to help them adapt the way of working. And the type of technology that we offer changes and makes operations a bit different. going to use voice less because you don't need your voice anymore to say hey I'm on the third floor on the left side of the building. With our technology having location is a given this means that voice is used for more mission critical essential communication and especially if you look at a place like Singapore it's full of high rises there's a lot of infrastructure below ground like malls and metro systems so I think they will benefit a lot from a technology like ours.

[7:03] Kevin Sofen: And so yeah I mean I had asked earlier about the difference between Firelaw EMS and sort of how you're applying it and you just talked a bit on Asia but from Asia, Europe, and America what are you seeing like is it the exact same focus of development or kind of how are you approaching development or kind of thinking of the cultural or human aspect when you're approaching development and market integration?

[7:28] Michael IIsbroux: There of course it's important to have the right partners in the field. As a company based in Europe and you want to scale you're looking for the right partnerships that can take our technology and integrate it into their components. So we actively look for partners in Europe, Asia and also in the US who know the cultural space, you know cultural requirements, operational requirements and then we can adapt and even need to focus our technology to different market spaces. But the core will always be the same. We're very much a research and development-driven organization. A lot of our budget goes to innovation and renewal of these capabilities. And then through partnerships with local players who are well-connected, who are present in the local market, we scale, basically, our business.

[8:13] Kevin Sofen: I love that focus and love that attention to that. And, you know, kind of, I'd ask you kind of like, what's next? And ultimately, but kind of bringing it back to the competition here of what, anything from first phase five that sort of surprised you or sort of that you're really excited about that kind of caught your attention these past couple days?

[8:30] Michael IIsbroux: Well, it was good to see how much, from a holistic perspective, the solutions towards the indoor positioning have been around in terms of GIS and maps for about 20 years. And there's many waves in technology. And what we see now is that the indoor positioning technologies from different companies have matured to a point that we are really getting there in terms of finally we have solved this age-old problem of indoor positioning and because you have all these competitors who are of a high grade in terms of capabilities, what really comforted me is that we're not the only ones that have a solution for it. There's multiple companies that have a solution for it, meaning that there's a large market space that is ready for us to serve, so we're not a lone player. There are multiple companies work in that market, so it's not a single market that is available, and there's a need for a market, so we know just we're doing an academic exercise, there's really some business need behind it.

[9:29] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, it's so important and I appreciate your leadership doing that, and maybe just kind of your thoughts, just to the earlier question, you know, I'm looking around, seeing other entrepreneurs and first responders, you know, as you've just kind of been in the weeds developing and building for public safety, what would you say to other companies or other individuals, entrepreneurs, that are thinking about designing for public safety? Any sort of suggestions on dos and don'ts or tips and tricks on some of the lessons you've learned on how you would approach. bringing new technology to first responders?

[10:03] Michael IIsbroux: I think it's important that a natural approach, I think, for engineers and technologists is to put technology first and then find a solution first and then try to solve a problem. It's important that you reverse the process, that within the public government space you find a real problem that exists and also a good sponsor and stakeholder that give you honest feedback on, okay, that's the way to go, that doesn't work for me. Because that will increase the iterations of your product in a meaningful way, that in the end comes to a marketable solution. So that's one important aspect to put forth. And also, this is an approach we've taken, and going back to what I said earlier, we listened first intently on, okay, how do you want to use the technology, and where do you want to place it, and what's usability factors, and from this derive the technical solution. Doing the inverse will just make it more difficult.

[10:51] Kevin Sofen: Well said. I mean, I usually ask this question next, and on the mic drop, You pretty much just gave us a mic drop, but you know to close us out I mean any sort of final thoughts or suggestions you could give us? I mean what you just said was brilliant and everyone should listen to that twice, but You know any maybe a question or a quote or a challenge that you could leave us with here today?

[11:13] Michael IIsbroux: Well, you have to be passionate about your work from this passion becomes creativity and from the creativity It becomes a solution that is marketable. That's really what it's all about if you're an entrepreneur

[11:23] Kevin Sofen: Well said, Michael. Well, it's been great to watch you from afar and excited to further collaborate and just keep up the good work.

[11:29] Michael IIsbroux: Thanks a lot, Kevin, and see you soon. Take care.

[11:33] Kevin Sofen: Cool. Take care. Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What'd you learn? Hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.