Firefighter Response System

• US 20090045942A1
• Filed: 08/16/2007
• Published: 02/19/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 08/16/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: FFRS LLC
• Original Assignee: Advanced First Responder Solutions, LLC
• Inventors: Schurter, Craig
• Granted Patent: US 7,898,410 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 340/539.110
• CPC Class Codes: A62C 99/00 Subject matter not provided for in other groups of this subclass
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 27/001 Signalling to an emergency team, e.g. firemen

Abstract

A method for identifying available resources for responding to an incident is provided. The method includes receiving a communication from each of a plurality of first responders, where the communication is responsive to an incident generated request, processing each of the communications to generate a response status for each of the plurality of first responders, and sending the response status for each of the plurality of first responders to a remote program.

Claims

1. A method for identifying available resources for responding to an incident, the method comprising:

receiving a communication from each of a plurality of first responders, where the communication is responsive to an incident generated request;

processing each of the communications to generate a response status for each of the plurality of first responders; and

sending the response status for each of the plurality of first responders to a remote program.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

displaying the response status for each of the plurality of first responders on a graphical user interface generated by the remote program, where the first responders include volunteer firefighter first responders.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the response status includes a confirmation that the first responder is responding to the incident.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein the response status includes an estimate of an amount of time for the first responder to respond to the incident and at least one of a firefighter rank and an emergency medical services rank for the first responder.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein processing the communication includes identifying the first responder based on a telephone number from which the communication is generated.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein the communication includes at least one of a telephonic message and a text-based message.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the remote program is executable on a client device and the response status for each of the plurality of first responders is sent to the client device via a network.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein the plurality of first responders are associated with different response units, and the response status for each of the plurality of first responders is sent to a plurality of remote programs associated with the different response units, the remote programs configured to display a graphical user interface having a view corresponding to each of the different response units and the response status for each of the plurality of first responders associated with the response units.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein the first responder is a volunteer firefighter that sends the communication via telephone, and

wherein processing the communication includes identifying the telephone number from which the communication is generated in order to identify the volunteer firefighter, identifying the called telephone number to identify the fire station that the volunteer firefighter is associated with, and determining whether or not the firefighter is responding to the incident.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein at least one of the communications from the plurality of first responders is generated via a hybrid tone pager device, the communication indicating that a volunteer firefighter is responding to the incident, and the communication initiated based on user input from the volunteer firefighter.

11. A method for presenting incident response information, the method comprising:

displaying response status information for each of a plurality of firefighter responders on a graphical user interface;

receiving a change in response status information of at least one of the plurality of firefighter responders; and

updating the graphical user interface to display the change in response status information of the at least one of the plurality of firefighter responders.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein the response status information includes a color code with different colors corresponding to different types of response status.

13. The method of claim 11 wherein the plurality of firefighter responders include volunteer firefighters and the response status information for each of the plurality of volunteer firefighters is displayed according to a corresponding fire station of each of the plurality of volunteer firefighters.

14. The method of claim 13 further comprising:

displaying response status information for at least one of the fire stations on the graphical user interface.

15. The method of claim 11 further comprising:

displaying a response report having incident response statistics based on previously compiled status response information of the plurality of firefighter responders.

16. The method of claim 15 wherein the incident response statistics include individual firefighter responder statistics and response unit statistics.

17. The method of claim 11 wherein the response status information includes at least one of an estimated time of arrival, firefighter rank, emergency medical services rank, time of which a reply is received, date of which a reply is received, an arrival status, and a checkout status.

18. The method of claim 11 wherein the change in response information for each of the plurality of firefighter responders is received via telephone, and the change in response information corresponds to an intention to respond for each of the firefighter responders.

19. The method of claim 11 wherein the change in response information for each of the plurality of firefighter responders is received via user input into a computing device.

21. The incident response system of claim 19 wherein each unique telephone number corresponds to a different fire station.

20. An incident response system, comprising:

a communication receiver configured to catalogue an incoming communication from each of a plurality of volunteer firefighters, each of the communications being catalogued according to a dialed telephone number; and

an incident response program configured to determine a response status for each of the plurality of volunteer firefighters based on each of the communications, the incident response program having a graphical user interface configured to display the response status for each of the plurality of volunteer firefighters associated with a common dialed telephone number.