Emergency response is getting an update courtesy of the College of Technology as a part of UH’s effort to make the campus safer.
As students boarded the informative bus they were shown various projects and research tools of the National Instruments Lab View by its experienced engineers. | Shaimaa Eissa/The Daily Cougar
With the new emergency management portal system created by Engineering Technology professor Deniz Gurkan and graduate students Partha Gala and Kiran Vemuri, the new portal will allow the Emergency Management team to be prepared and ready to respond promptly and with great accuracy.
“I am so happy that after all of these years of doing emergency management; we now have a portal that allows us to get in on the incident even faster and get it out to our community just as fast,” said Joe S. Mendez, director of Emergency Management.
The portal will be available to the Emergency Management team this year as a production level support system that allows the staff to connect to the web to report an emergency. The emergency management portal will have balloon markers on each building.
By clicking on the balloon marker, it will display a box of information about that building and includes the building name, number, short name, IP address to the building camera and link to the building webpage.
The staff can click the “Emergency Warning” button in the box and then send a warning on the level of urgency and the emergency type to all of those allowed to view the portal such as the UH police and local firemen. This enables the local operators in the UH area to access the emergency data faster to send out dispatches and emergency notifications.
“With the UH police department permission, we are also now trying to implement all of the university security card access through the portal, so that way, we can lock down a location safely without being there,” Mendez said.
The system took two months to develop, and Gurkan and her team are trying to integrate more information and change the display, so it is more effective for the Emergency Management team. The ultimate goal is that this portal system will keep the campus safer.
“We started working with Joe Mendez and initially we decided to only integrate information about video cameras around the campus because it gives the most visual input,” Gurkan said. “And now we are trying to integrate card access systems and now are going to put this portal as a production system into the emergency operation center.”
