Broadland District Council, United Kingdom utilise the VeriLocation Personal Tracking application running on BlackBerry 8310’s within its revenue and benefits department.
The system uses the VeriLocation personal Tracking application to locate a handset in real time and push out the location over GPRS to VeriLocation’s web servers where account holders can view using bespoke maps the handsets exact location both now and historically. A panic button can be activated by pressing a button on the BlackBerry which then displays on the VeriLocation web portal along with an audible alarm
The Revenue & Benefits department personnel are involved in visiting clients homes and the device is used for Lone Worker protection which falls under the Health & Safety Act ( 1974 ) and more recently the Corporate Manslaughter act.
The VeriLocation service provides peace of mind to staff knowing that their whereabouts is recorded at all times with the BlackBerry 8310 pushing out its location every minute without any user intervention. The added benefit of the panic alarm provides added assurance that the employee can raise the alarm discretely without escalating the situation they may find themselves in. Previously agencies mainly used cumbersome and costly manual call in systems which relied on user action and voice messaging, plus no user location data would have been recorded. Alarm activation would have been via a mobile phone call or would rely on a trigger alert based on when the user last called in and so would have wasted valuable time in a potentially dangerous situation.
Legacy Lone Worker systems relied on numerous mobile phone calls and manual user intervention on a regular basis. This inevitably cost considerable sums of money in telecommunications, recording software and required monitoring. With VeriLocation, Broadland District Council can provide its employees with an automated system for Lone Worker protection and in so doing mitigate risks and associated costs around failings under the Health & Safety Act and Corporate Manslaughter act.
The VeriLocation Personal Tracking service is a worldwide application merely requiring a GPRS connection and GPS enabled BlackBerry device. Any agency with employees working in the field or in any potentially hazardous environment would benefit from this application.