Real-Time Open Source Data Analytics and Visualization Platform

Prominent Edge

Transitioning fire departments into data-driven organizations is critical to improving public safety. This project addresses barriers that departments face when making this transition and demonstrates how our team has accelerated this process for departments across the country. Our research has seen the following impacts:

• Improves Public Safety Response Times -- We have heard from multiple fire departments that our tools have significantly improved response times by as much as 30 seconds.
• Improves Firefighter Safety -- Our research can alert department leaders to the units that are at a higher risk of experiencing negative health impacts from the job. For example, we alert departments when units are committed to emergency incidents for longer than three hours during the night time hours. This allows decision makers to mitigate the impact of sleep deprivation by moving those personnel to slower units during subsequent shifts. - July 2019

Meet the Team

Principle Investigator: Tyler Garner
Prominent Edge

---

Project Overview

Public Safety Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to balance limited resources while simultaneously justifying current operations and adapting to changing service demands. By effectively analyzing and visualizing data, public safety organizations can proactively monitor changing response landscapes and make data driven decisions while objectively monitoring the outcome. This can impact all aspects of a public safety organization including staffing levels, development of standard operating procedures and internal policies, training efforts, and resource deployments. Although it is hard to deny the potential impact of data analytics in the public safety sector, analyzing and visualizing data is not an easy feat given the constraints of many public safety organizations.

Today, effective data exploitation requires software licenses, specialized knowledge of tools, and in-house technical expertise that public safety organizations often lack. Larger organizations utilize commercial off-the-shelf tools that are cost prohibitive for small and medium size organizations. Furthermore, proprietary tools end up vendor locking the customer, reducing an organization's ability to adapt. This project will enable wide scale utilization of powerful real-time data analytics for public safety organizations by producing an open source analytics platform, called StatEngine, built from "best-of-breed" data analysis and visualization tools.

 

Objectives of StatEngine include:

• Provide a complete solution which leverages existing open source tools to significantly reduce expenses and eliminate "vendor lock-in"
• Automate complex installation and configuration steps inherent in standing up an on-premise instance of modern analytic tools
• Provide a production cloud instance to further reduce barrier of entry and increase public safety adoption
• Reduce the complexity of common analytic workflows including real-time extracting, transforming and loading data
• Enhance the open source tools to support common PSO-specific requirements
• Make valuable common analytics available across jurisdictions
• Provide thorough documentation and training tutorials
• Create an open source community around public safety analytics to provide channels for cross jurisdictional communications and knowledge transfer

StatEngine will accelerate public safety adoption of data analytics by eliminating common barriers of entry including cost and technical expertise. Once complete, public safety organizations of any size will be able to exploit large volumes of complex, highly relevant, and impactful data sets in real time.

To learn more about StatEngine, visit our website, GitHub, or follow us on twitter.

 << Back to the PSIAP 2017 - Public Safety Analytics Page