Life Safety Sensor Beacon Signal Proximity Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current life safety sensor systems fail to provide users with location information about detected emergency conditions, such as smoke or carbon monoxide, within a monitored region, making it difficult for occupants to effectively escape or for emergency personnel to locate the source.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a wireless beacon signal transmission system, using iBeacon or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals, where sensors transmit a beacon signal upon detecting an emergency condition, allowing user devices to determine their proximity to the emergency zone based on signal strength, enabling users to navigate safely or locate the source.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If all sensors and alarms are activated upon detecting an emergency condition, then users are alerted that there is an emergency, but users cannot determine the specific location of the emergency within the region
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides the monitored region into multiple zones with sensors distributed throughout. When an emergency is detected, only the specific sensor and its associated alarm in that zone are activated, rather than activating all sensors and alarms region-wide. This segmentation allows precise location identification while maintaining reliable emergency alerting.
2Ease of operation
If location information is provided to users during an emergency, then users can navigate safely away from or toward the emergency zone, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a central control system as an intermediary that receives signals from distributed sensors, determines emergency locations, and communicates this information to user devices. This intermediary manages the complexity centrally rather than requiring complex distributed intelligence in each sensor node, enabling location awareness while keeping individual device complexity low.
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces physical location indicators (such as visual or acoustic signals at fixed locations) with wireless electronic communication between sensors, a central system, and user devices. This substitution enables dynamic location information delivery to mobile users without requiring complex mechanical or physical signaling infrastructure throughout the region.
3Reliability
If a one-all-go protocol activates all alarms in the region, then emergency awareness is maximized, but the ability to locate the emergency source is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements local quality by activating alarms and providing enhanced notification only in the specific zone where an emergency is detected, rather than uniformly activating all alarms region-wide. Sensors and alarms have different local functions based on their location, with the affected zone receiving urgent local alerts while other zones maintain normal operation, thereby preserving location precision without sacrificing overall detection coverage.
Data Source
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AI summary
Systems and methods of location based awareness of life safety sensors are provided. Some methods can include detecting an ambient emergency condition (110), and, responsive to detecting the ambient emergency condition, transmitting a wireless beacon signal (120), wherein a range into which the wireless beacon signal is transmitted is limited, and wherein a signal strength of the wireless beacon signal progressively decreases from a first part of the range, adjacent a source of the wireless beacon signal, to a second part of the range, displaced from the source of the wireless beacon signal. Additionally or alternatively, some methods can include receiving the wireless beacon message from a sensor device, determining the signal strength of the wireless beacon message, and based on the signal strength, determining the range of the sensor device.