EMYNOS
New EU Project to Design a Next Generation Platform for Emergency Communications
The EMYNOS project, launched in September 2015, joins 11 organisations across Europe that will work to improve current technologies and design a Next Generation emergency platform enabling communications from citizens to emergency call centre.
On the 1st September 2015, the new EU-funded project EMYNOS (nExt generation eMergencY commuNicatiOnS) was launched. Led by Fraunhofer Fokus, Berlin, Germany, the project gathers a consortium of eleven different organisations, including telecom/satellite operators, VoIP providers, eCall testers, and end users. This mixture ensures that the consortium comes with the required expertise to achieve the project goals. The organisations forming the EMYNOS project consortium are:
- Fraunhofer Fokus (Germany; project coordinator)
- Turksat (Turkey)
- Technological Educational Institute of Crete (Greece, Technical Manager)
- Navcert GmbH (Germany)
- Public Safety Communications Europe (Belgium)
- Serviciul de Telecomunicatii Speciale (Romania)
- VOZTELECOM Sistemas (Spain)
- Harpo Sp.z.o.o (Poland)
- Hellenic Open University (Greece)
- Osterreichisches Rotes Kreuz (Austria)
- MCS Datalabs (Germany)
EMYNOS recognises that the current technologies for emergency systems and 112 services are becoming outdated and can no longer match the everyday needs of European citizens. Some of the related limitations of the current technologies are partial media support, a lack of integration of social media, and the use of an analogue modem for providing eCall services with limited data amount. As most operators have started migrating towards broadband IP-based infrastructures few years ago, current emergency systems also need to be upgraded and adapted in order to fulfil the regulatory requirements in terms of Next Generation emergency services.
To this end, EMYNOS seeks to design and implement a Next Generation platform, capable of accommodating rich-media emergency calls that combine voice, text, and video, thus constituting a powerful tool for coordinating communication among citizens, call centres and first responders.
Additionally, issues such as call routing/redirection to the closest available call centre, retrieval of the caller location, hoax calls prevention, support for people with disabilities, and integration of social media will be addressed throughout the course of the project. Some emphasis will also be placed on the new eCall system.
The EMYNOS project will run for two and a half years, until 1st March 2018.