Festivals, campus visitors, and concert-goers flooding venues like Grant Park in Chicago this weekend can expect heightened security, prompted by the mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival last year. While measures including more police officers, stronger barriers and a longer list of prohibited items certainly helps, a large part of public safety relies on seamless communication between event staff, security, volunteers, and public safety personnel.

Advances in broadband wireless technologies offer unprecedented capabilities that have the potential to improve the effectiveness of security personnel exponentially. More specifically, professional instant communication applications such as LINX PTT are a broadband/WiFi alternative to traditional two-way communication and a great tool to optimize team correspondence, send emergency alerts and track incidents and personnel emergency response in real time.

LINX offers invaluable features in a festival or large event setting

BYOD

In addition to security personnel, volunteers help run festivals and large events; however, they are not always equipped with the same communication technology as police officers.

With LINX BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) feature, volunteers and administrators can be granted network access to push-to-talk calling, instant messaging, file sharing, GPS team tracking, personnel security features and more right on their own personal device. This technology equips volunteers with professional communication and safety features on par with those used by Public Safety officials, ties all teams together on one seamless network, and provides peace of mind that authorities can be reached at one touch on their screen, should an emergency arise.

Private & Group Calls

Through the Push-to-Talk function, LINX users can make one-to-one instant connections or transmit one-to-many broadcast style calls, depending what the situation requires.

For example, when a medical tent is running low on hydration packs, the LINX user could make a private call to the head of resources to request a supply replenishment of more hydration packs to his or her tent. The head of resources can see the caller’s location on their live map and dispatch the hydration packs to that tent accordingly.  

Contrastingly, should an emergency arise involving a weapon-wielding, or otherwise unruly person running through the festival grounds, a LINX user can broadcast a call to multiple, if not all, their groups on the network to issue an alert. Warning everyone of a perpetrator or potential incident would allow the group to see where the caller is located, record the incident’s details in real time, and could afford staff an opportunity to anticipate the perpetrator’s next movements to respond accordingly.

Alerts & Alarms

Tying into the point above, in addition to two-way push to talk calls, LINX users are equipped with unique safety and emergency management features. Users may send out a time-stamped, geo-coded GPS signals via an instant SOS distress call with one touch of their emergency button. After sending an emergency alarm, the user’s unit will trigger an emergency state that alerts and is visible to other users and the event’s management dispatch teams, allowing for more immediate response.

Integrated personnel safety features such as Man-Down and Lone-Worker offer additional protective protocols in the event that a team member is in distress. In certain emergency situations where timing is everything, LINX Alerts and Alarms could add precious seconds to how quickly teams respond.

Man Down & Lone Worker

Festivals and large events largely happen in the summer, and it’s not unheard of for volunteers to collapse in the heat. The LINX app detects falls and triggers an alert to send help to the unresponsive worker, whose live location appears within the app.

LINX user devices can be set to automatically transmit emergency alarms if the worker should fall or fail to check in within a determined timeframe. The system’s administrator activates these settings to automatically operate in the background of their team member’s devices to provide an additional mobile worker security layer beyond voice and location tracking features. These safety features exist to protect mobile workers through automated status check-ins and the use of innovative gyroscope technology within mobile devices that can detect falls by reporting the phone when tipped past a certain angle.

From a public safety view, if the system detects multiple Man Down alerts from wounded personnel, the system administrator could dispatch not only emergency response services, but also can manage teams and reassign additional back-up personnel to the area.

File Sharing

LINX supports image/file sharing individually, within groups, and with your dispatchers to provide an efficient way to share vital information. Say a volunteer witnesses a person potentially dealing illicit substances in the crowds; the volunteer could take a picture and send the file to their team. This provides a clear visual instead of relying on often misunderstood verbal descriptions.

As you can see, LINX offers exceptional benefits and multiple tools for mobile workforces all on one device. Be ready to connect and protect your team and audience next summer by Requesting a Demo of LINX today.