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Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service in major handheld data rollout.
Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service has purchased 100 licenses for Integral mForms® from Integral Mobile Data (IMD). Integral mForms® is being rolled out across the service’s geography of Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland to assist firefighters in working with the government’s Home Fire Risk Assessment initiative.
“The modern fire service is as much about prevention as firefighting”, says Andy Robinson, GIS Development Officer for Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service. “Firefighters visit residents to help them reduce the risk of having a fire in their homes.”
Previously, this required the answering of a two-page questionnaire by each household, the contents of which were then re-keyed into a SQL database by the firefighters themselves.
In their goal to save time and money and provide a more efficient service, Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue researched the available solutions and rapidly decided that Integral mForms® was most suited to their needs. Integral mForms® allows programmers and non-programmers to develop forms-based applications for a wide variety of mobile platforms, including Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Windows XP Tablet, Symbian and BlackBerry®. These applications are designed to update virtually any database, regardless of physical location. Once developed, an application can be seamlessly ported to any other platform. “The application had to be easy for our firefighters to use with a minimum of technical training.” says Andy Robinson. “We also had a short window for development.”
A successful pilot allowed firefighters to take a Windows Mobile 5 based PDA into a household, do a quick and effective survey of the home, and then return to their fire station. Back at the fire station all they had to do was to place the handset onto the cradle and the information was automatically uploaded to the Microsoft SQL database.
“The response to our six-month pilot was very positive,” says Andy Robinson. “What used to take half an hour per form is now input in seconds through a single synchronisation – with better data integrity and quality of information.” As a result the Service has committed to a full roll-out programme across the entire geography.
There are other applications to come. Andy Robinson is looking forward to developing applications to assist with legislative demands and operational preparedness, for instance with early visit to potentially hazardous buildings.
IMD Sales & Marketing Director John Foster says: “Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service have proven themselves to be an efficient and effective organisation, taking on board the importance of the practical implementation of the application, and at the same time saving time and money and providing a vital public service. And, of course, it’s yet another 100-user rollout for Integral mForms® – demonstrating both the product’s power and its scalability.”
