From February 12th to 14th, PARTICLE joined in the first Pan-European Mobile Emergency Application (PEMEA) Plugtests™ event that brought together in Sophia Antipolis, France, sixteen organisations from across Europe, in an initiative organised by ETSI in partnership with the PEMEA Consortium.
PARTICLE brought for testing the Citizen Application SWAPP developed as part of the NIGHTINGALE Project (https://www.nightingale-triage.eu) by PARTICLE, INOV and CESTEL. The Application Tests successfully validated the SWAPP’s interoperability with PEMEA core nodes and services, including instant messaging, real-time text and audio-video features. With CESTEL support, PARTICLE connected the SWAPP with the testing infrastructure and validated interoperable secure communications via TLS.
In emergencies, SWAPP supports (1) citizen-to-emergency services communications and (2) citizen-to-citizen communications. In the citizen-to-emergency services communications mode, modern Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled communication capabilities allow citizens to contact emergency services using audio, text and video channels, effectively resulting in a democratic and universal access that displays also improved accessibility (e.g., deaf or hard of hearing citizens are able to use video and text to communicate with the 112 Service). In addition, the advanced SWAPP communication features allow the citizen calling 112 to send to the emergency services’ specific data, that may be useful to improve the 112 operator’s understanding of the emergency and improve the situational awareness of FRs, effectively improving the emergency response effort.
In the citizen-to-citizen communications mode, SWAPP empowers responsible citizenship and the building of volunteering communities. Using SWAPP, citizens may register to the pool of volunteers and share their profile with other fellow volunteers, providing details of their competences and skills on first aid, emergency assistance, medical support and triage know-how. In addition, it is possible for citizens to create specific groups to exchange information.
During the Plug Tests, the SWAPP’s PEMEA functions were successfully tested and demonstrated with PSAP systems from three different countries, namely Finland, Romania and Slovenia. The tested functions included the initiation of a 112 PEMEA call with different PSAP operators, the sharing of personal data in a 112 call, a video call between the caller and the PSAP operator and the chat and Real-Time Text (RTT) functionality.
The following images depict different moments of SWAPP during the PEMEA Test Plugs.
As PEMEA technology expands across Europe, these tests demonstrated that PARTICLE’s SWAPP is aligned with promising European interoperability standards supporting advanced emergency services.
Click here to access the ETSI PEMEA full report.
