New app could revamp personal security

Let’s be honest. How safe do you feel when you step out of your house everyday? At the back of your mind, there is always this nagging anxiety - what if one of the dreadful crimes you see in the news were to happen to you or your loved ones? No doubt that public spaces in metro cities across India are covered under CCTV surveillance, but when you think about it, how safe does a CCTV really make you feel?

CCTVs have been pivotal in revolutionizing public and personal security, helping law enforcement agencies to record crime as it happens and using the footage to catch the bad guys. From offices to private homes and schools to warehouses, almost every public space, commercial property and private property, is ‘protected’ by a CCTV based surveillance system.

But here is the problem with CCTVs - they only record. There is no existing mechanism that allows CCTV cameras to sound alerts or to put it simply, to deter crime.

Despite the rise in number of CCTVs in our public spaces, the crime rate has refused to go down. Businesses and individuals continue to get robbed and women continue to be physically or verbally assaulted in full public view. CCTVs used to act as a deterrent but those days are long gone. Criminals know that by the time the CCTV footage is analysed, they will be miles away from the crime scene.

However, deterring crime is easier said than done. For that we need a dedicated solution that intelligently detects crime and sounds the alarm, effectively preventing or deterring a crime about to take place. Thankfully, we don’t need to wait for the future for a solution like this.

Wise Systech hopes to revolutionize personal security with IRA, a first-of-its-kind autonomous security solution that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning and, surprisingly, your smartphone to provide customisable personal security.

IRA fuses multiple situation interpretation algorithms with behavioural video and data analytics to detect violent behaviour, intrusions, dangerous objects and distress audio signals. The application instantly sounds an alert or a response, which is configured by the user. For example, if the application detects certain alert keywords, like lewd or threatening language, it will instantly send your location and a recording of the incident to your loved ones and law enforcement officers. Wow!

And that is not all. Thanks to machine learning, as more and more people use it, it will continue to learn new threatening words, situations and behavior, to provide a complete security blanket.

For those of us who are worried about privacy, IRA stores and analyses data locally on your smartphone, instead of beaming it away to a far off server. Additionally, it remains only half-awake, meaning that it will only activate and trigger a response when it detects a threatening situation.

Wise Systech plans to launch IRA at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on 7th January 2018, followed by a public demonstration of its features. It will be made available to the masses in the second quarter of 2018.

IRA could trigger a paradigm shift in how we view security, taking it from a public orientation, to a private one, where each individual is protected by their own personal security system that is easy to set up and doesn't cost a bomb.