VESOS looking out for  X_HeERO

The specialist eCall consultancy and software company VESOS Solutions is leading the British contribution to Europe’s review of the emergency alerting system’s services across the continent.

eCall automatically raises the alarm in the event of a crash when the airbags are deployed, and it can also be manually activated by the driver or passenger by pressing the eCall SOS button. It has been installed in all newly approved cars and vans across the UK and Europe since 2018.  The review is necessary to cope with the switch-off of second-generation mobile phone signals, upon which the present eCall service relies.

VESOS is led by four connected vehicle experts, Andy Graham, Andy Rooke, Danny Woolard and Alan Gentle, and is the first dedicated company for analysing and processing eCall data to create validated incident alerts.  The company will contribute to Europe’s X_HeERO project which is preparing countries which use eCall to upgrade their Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), used to handle emergency calls.

“Although the eventual switch-off of 2G phone signals presents a challenge, there is also a major upside in planning for it which is the opportunity to develop next generation eCall services with greater data capacity, more sensor data and use cases that go beyond notifying the emergency services,” explained Andy Rooke, who is a former Police Inspector who has worked the implementation of eCall for more than 20 years.  “This project will provide an outline of upgrading of the PSAPs and the focus on new use cases.  These include identifying Vulnerable Road Users, and advanced, better data exchange between third party telematics services and public eCall.”

Specifically, VESOS will support the project in helping define a minimum set of data to be transmitted by Next Generation eCall, data transmission and software, and preparation for eCall for Vulnerable Road Users and autonomous vehicles.  The company will share expertise gained from recent projects focussed on building use cases for road operations, such as stopped vehicle detection, enhancing operational information for emergency responders and the identification of Vulnerable Road Users. They will work with emergency services to validate the findings from the consortium partners and via the DfT to co-ordinate UK information exchange.

VESOS commented, “eCall has already brought a new level of information. Before eCall, the transfer of information was only achieved by direct speech between two people, but now the location is presented when the PSAP operator picks up the call, plus information about the vehicle type and its propulsion, which is really important because Electric Vehicles and traditional petrol and diesel ones offer very different challenges to the fire service.  With Next Generation eCall, we can look forward to even more information being available.”

The value of eCall has already been proven.  VESOS analysed data in Ireland and found a five-minute time saving in raising an alert to the operational teams, which would allow them to respond to incidents much faster. In addition, detection of eCall airbag alerts were detected on rural parts of the country’s trunk road network that currently has no other infrastructure-based detection.

(Picture – VESOS)

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