Ford Taps Nokia for Location Based Emergency Response Service

Published on: 17th Sep 2012

­Nokia today announced that its Location & Commerce business is supplying modified pan-European reference data to the Ford Motor Company to enable its Emergency Assistance technology to not only identify the location of the driver in need of help, but also the appropriate language needed to alert local emergency service operators.

This system saves crucial seconds by sending automated voice messages and co-ordinates directly to local emergency service operators in their own language, rather than first routing through a third party call centre.

Ford's system identifies the correct local language using modified geofences in the Nokia Location & Commerce reference data. This language based geofencing defines both country borders and regional sub-divisions which effect language - for example within Belgium or Switzerland so that notification of an accident and precise location of the vehicle can be communicated to the local emergency services.

In addition, to ensure that the emergency calls can be generated as quickly as possible, storage and compression technology was used to produce a significantly smaller footprint. With the minimum amount of data to process, the system can respond much quicker. The Nokia Location & Commerce solution combines several new techniques to compress the file without losing any valuable data.

"We are confident that solutions enabling fast and efficient connection to emergency services could help speed up response times and are delighted that Ford selected our data as part of the development of its Emergency Assistance technology," explained Bruno Bourguet, Senior Vice President of Sale and Business Development, Nokia Location & Commerce. "With a consistent global specification, the reference data can be easily maintained or expanded to additional countries. It could also be further adapted for other geofencing applications using the existing set of map conversion tools."

Emergency Assistance will be free-of-charge as part of the SYNC platform already found on over four million cars in the USA. It makes its first European appearance on the B-MAX which will go on sale later this year.

 

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