One of the four founders of the start-up eCall consultancy and solutions company VESOS has been given the honour of life membership of the public safety technology association British APCO.

Andy Rooke, who has worked on the concept and real-world implementation of eCall for 20 years has been recognised for his outstanding contribution and professional guidance in public safety.

eCall is automatically activated in the event of an incident when the airbags are deployed and can also be manually activated by the driver or passenger by pressing the eCall SOS button.  Mr Rooke has worked on the concept’s implementation and been instrumental in developing a new service with VESOS, TeCall, which delivers faster response and detailed information using the data collated from eCall-enabled vehicles, which includes almost every new car and van sold in the UK since 2018.

Mr Rooke spent nearly eight years as Vice President of British ACPO, and completed 31 years in the Police Service, specialising in road policing and ITS deployment for the emergency services as the technology developed.  He has also worked for Transport for London and ERTICO – ITS Europe.

The award was presented at the British APCO gala dinner at the Coventry Building Society Arena, by the President of British APCO Chris Lucas supported by two past presidents John Anthony MBE Keith Phillips OBE in front of an audience of 450 public safety industry and specialist.

 “I am extremely proud to have been honoured with this award by my peers,” Mr Rooke said.

He started VESOS alongside three other of the world’s most knowledgeable consultants in connected vehicles and traffic operations, Andy Graham, Danny Woolard and Alan Gentle, who formed the first dedicated company for analysing and processing eCall data to create validated incident alerts. The company also consults on implementation and business cases for eCall, as well as strategic advice and data analysis.

(Picture, L-R – Chris Lucas, John Anthony, Andy Rooke, Keith Phillips)