The world of communications is constantly expanding and we love to see the innovative and inspiring applications developers build. We do everything we can to provide developers with the tools they need to make ground breaking projects.

The students at the Illinois Institute of Technology are doing just that. Their real-time communications lab strives to strikes a balance between theory and practice and is constantly challenging its students to solve real life issues through different applied projects.

Led by their professor Carol Davids, an expert in the telecommunications industry, the team has recently been working on a project that provides emergency responders with accurate information using WebRTC. The students developed an application that receives real-time data from Bluetooth beacons that pinpoint the callers precise location within a building, including the floor number, and sends the data to emergency responders.

Their application also attempts to solve other emergency communication problems including language barriers and alerting emergency operators of food allergies and other medical conditions.

Real time location tracking would shorten the amount of time it takes for Emergency Responders to reach an incident, which has the potential to save a lot of lives. We are thrilled to see all of the creative ways developers are using communications platforms!

Jose Luis Martin Casarrubios demonstrated how the team integrated their indoor location project with SignalWire Cloud when they were attending ClueCon: the FreeSWITCH open source project’s annual conference.

One of their beacons detected the live location of the caller, sent it out, geocoded it, and then SignalWire sent Jose’s smartphone an SMS and a text to speech call with an emergency response of his location.

We are very impressed by the students’ work and are excited to see how this project will evolve. The FreeSWITCH team is looking forward to visiting IIT’s real-time communications conference this Monday!