Global Success to Safety and Security System Developed by Israeli Startup

Global Success to Safety and Security System Developed by Israeli Startup

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During an emergency or disaster event, the response speed of the rescue teams and the coordination among the forces managing the incident are critical. The innovative Israeli startup NowForce has developed a ground-breaking solution for the management of incidents and events on emergency and routine, first responder management and real-time situational awareness for the incident managers. It is a flexible command and control system available either as an on-site installation or a cloud-based service, with a simple and rapid installation. The system manages events and teams at the scene through mobile applications developed by the company. Last year, NowForce was named one of the top 10 Homeland Security Solution Providers by govCIO, along with corporations as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The company has won the first prize at the iHLS Startup Competition for Security and HLS in July 2018, granting an investment prize by Arieli Capital and participation at the fifth cycle of iHLS Security Accelerator.

NowForce was founded in 2008 by three entrepreneurs – Jonathan Bendheim, Fibro Israel’s CEO; Assaf Shafran, an Israeli Air Force aircraft navigator; and Anshel Pfeffer, a former IDF Battalion Commander and a licensed paramedic. Their professional experience has been the basis for the development of the company’s technology.

The company, with customers all over the world, was ahead of market when smartphone applications were not so common. Using SaaS cloud services was also a novelty at the time, and currently, most of the NowForce’s customers use the software via the cloud.

“At the beginning, most of our customers were from the emergency services, but during the last few years, organizations and corporations have learned that a rapid response to critical incidents is not only the role of public security agencies, but also the need of any organization with incidents and tasks for which the time factor is critical,” said Assaf Shafran, the company’s CEO. “We succeeded in making organizations understand that with a relatively small investment, the prevalent devices at our disposal can turn into a friendly and simple system that makes the incident resource management more efficient and considerably decreases response time to incidents,” Shafran added.

The company’s customers are dispersed in more than 1,700 cities all over the world, mainly in the US, including municipalities, education and health institutes, airports, the US postal service, corporations, emergency organizations and security companies.

In Israel, the company is a sole provider of the IDF, Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and the Tel-Aviv Municipality. The IDF has recently purchased the distress app for all its soldiers and has deployed control centers around Israel. All the education and welfare institutions in Tel-Aviv are equipped with the system’s distress app. The company has won an innovation prize for this system in Tel-Aviv. The Maccabiah event in Israel was managed by NowForce’s system, as each of the 10,000 sportsmen and sportswomen was equipped with the personal safety app.

In contrast to distress and report applications around the world, NowForce’s system supplies a complete and comprehensive solution for all aspects of event management, based on the accumulative experience of millions of managed incidents.

How Does it Work?

The system has three main components:

  • Reporter/SOS application
  • Command and control software
  • Responder application

When an emergency is reported through the Reporter application, an incident is opened at the relevant command center with all the information about the incident, including location, with live video. The distress and report application is passive, i.e. the person’s location is detected only upon an incident report, and this way the reporters’ information is kept private. Opening incidents on the system can also be triggered by a phone call or one of the system’s numerous interfaces with other systems, e.g. video analytics, various sensors and entrance control devices.

At the core of the command and control software, based on a registered patent, is the ability to dispatch the right responder to the right place. The dispatching law system for each and every incident is established and updated by the organization. The systems dispose all the updated information regarding any responder team member through his/her smartphone, and on this base it can calculate the responder’s ETA at the scene and recommend accordingly to the command center on the most available responder, or alternatively, to operate an automatic dispatch without human intervention. The system includes many additional modules, including a Business Intelligence system for the organization’s performance analysis, a report export module for regulatory purposes and many capabilities regarding the investigation of the incident.

At the responder side, the minute the team member receives the incident through the mobile phone, the application displays all the data related to the event, including the reporter details, images and information added by the dispatcher, and feeds the location to the user’s favorite navigation app (e.g. Waze).

During the event, the responder can stream live video and is constantly connected to an incident list, other responders, a mapping showing the forces at the field, etc. Recently, the company added the option of PTT communication, such as Mirs, including the ability to automatically create a group of contacts specific to the incident, immediately as it is established.

The Advantages of the System

One of the advantages of the technology is its independence from any permanent location. The whole command and control center can be re-established and managed from the smartphone or tablet, for example when an evacuation of the command and control center site itself is required.

The system is highly modular. The customers can have many sub-theme centers according to their fields of interest, each one with its own authorizations.

The system is connected to physical objects – cameras, water hoses and fire hydrants, sensors – all appear on the responders and dispatchers screens, with their exact locations.

The system’s geographic capability enables the control of the number of responders at a certain polygon, and monitoring personnel.

The system complies with the stringent standards of the IDF, federal customers, etc., and its highly secured information system includes an encrypted message module for an emergency.

Thanks to the flexibility of the system, it can interface with almost any type of existing system, so that the organization is not forced to purchase any new systems. The system is integrated with various systems of Verint, which is one of the investors in the company.