SBIR Phase I: Enabling High-Bandwidth Audio-Visual Connectivity to Vehicles with Public Safety Applications

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project explores the design and implementation of a robust and high-bandwidth audio-visual communication system between vehicles (especially, emergency vehicles such as police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances) and command and control centers. The core innovation in this system, called Virtuoso, lies in specific algorithmic design that uses network diversity efficiently where media traffic from individual flows are robustly striped across multiple wireless networks simultaneously. Virtuosois designed from the ground-up to meet commercial and societal needs in facilitating new public safety applications not possible before.For example, by establishing an audio-visual link between patients in ambulances and emergency room doctors, it enables hospital systems to provide new and improved urgent care services. The intellectual merit of the project lies in its specific design that enables these new applications and improvements. This design includes specific multi-path striping techniques and a cloud-based management service that allow the system to scale to a large number of vehicles. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project lies in improving the quality of public safety and emergency services possible. For example, this system enables a new, real-time, high-bandwidth audio-visual link between medical ambulances and hospitals. Preliminary talks with multiple Emergency Medical Systems in the Madison area indicate the life-saving potential of these applications. The commercial potential of this technology stems from growing needs in the vehicular space. Longer term commercialization opportunities exist and are being discussed with various emergency medical services organizations (including the Dane County EMS) and public bus operators (Madison Metro Transit and Van Galder Bus, a subsidiary of Coach USA) where significant deployment based trials are ongoing for more than 1 year.