By US Digital Designs Staff

Today’s mobile technology—smartphones, tablets and “phablets”—can you let you do almost anything. You can check stock prices, get instant news alerts, and post videos and status updates on social media. And, firefighters and first responders can even get mobile alerts when there’s an incident or emergency.

Yes, fire station alerting is going mobile. Customers of the US Digital Designs’ Phoenix G2 Fire Station Alerting System can now get critical and live-incident fire station alerting information—both at the station and on their mobile devices—to help reduce response times.

Fire Station Alerting Mobile Technology is Evolving
Many fire department “old-timers” will entertain some of their newer crew members with stories from long ago. They may talk about how firefighters had no modern computer systems for getting emergency alerts from their dispatch centers and how they relied on alerts from only via two-way handheld radios. Even worse, departments in rural areas often had to rely on dialup phones to first responders’ homes. That situation made getting alerts via handheld radios seem high-tech. Radios and computerized/IP fire station alerting is still very much a critical way to notify responders of an incident, but it’s time that departments get up to speed and make use of current technology.

As we all know, verbal communication is much slower than written communication and is subject to user error by first responders who are responsible for taking the information communicated via handheld radio and passing it on to others based on their recollection. Combined with modern dispatch and alert systems like the Phoenix G2 Fire Station Alerting System, smartphone and tablet technology applications can now provide instant verbal, written, and location alerts to multiple users, regardless of whether they are in the firehouse or on the road.

Fire Station Alerting Mobile Application Features
At US Digital Designs, we’ve stayed ahead of the curve in monitoring technology advancements and the impact they have on our industry. At present, although it seems as if anyone can put together an app and sell it via the Apple or Google online stores, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Many organizations want to be the first to market a unique idea and, as a result, have offered an inferior product.

We’ve given the concept of a mobile technology a lot of research and development over the last few years, to try and determine which features should/should not be included in such a product offering. We’ve also researched how to develop the back-end infrastructure so that it’s just as dependable as our in-quarters Phoenix G2 Fire Station Alerting System—no matter what country or state it’s being used in. After a thoughtful analysis, we worked with our clients to prioritize what they felt should be the primary functionality of any mobile offering:

• The ability to receive simultaneous mobile alerts. Life is unpredictable and, more often than not, a first responder might have multiple incidents in which he is involved. An application that provides for concurrent alerts is critical.
• Hearing the same tones as the station. In addition to visual alerts, the mobile application should also allow users to hear information, including tones, so t