A survey found Australians want artificial intelligence (AI) to improve emergency service delivery, with many willing to share personal data on triple-0 (000) calls.
Emergency hotlines and carriers have been under intense scrutiny since September, when several people died in connection with the massive Optus outage, and it was revealed that a software glitch in Samsung mobile phones prevented calls to triple zero.
A September survey of more than 2,500 people in Australia and New Zealand by Researchscape for Motorola Solutions found that 86% of respondents were willing to share their precise location with emergency services.
Additionally, 75% were reluctant to share personal information about pre-existing conditions, and 54% said they would share wearable health data from devices such as smartwatches.
A total of 58% also said they supported the introduction of AI that could detect critical information from emergency calls (including keywords like “knife” or “crash”) to speed up emergency response, as well as translate live calls into foreign languages and process live video of callers to identify potential threats.
“Triple Zero and 111” [in New Zealand] For more than 60 years, hotlines have provided the public with a lifeline during times of crisis, but the need to modernize emergency call processing technology has never been greater,” said Craig Anderson, executive chair of the National Emergency Communications Working Group (NECWG).
Sixty years later, the way the majority of people seek help in an emergency is still by dialing triple zero (000). (ABC: Simon Leo Brown )
“These findings show that communities expect emergency services to keep up with rapid technological change and that there is a clear generational shift among younger users, who expect them to offer more ways to contact emergency services in addition to voice calls.”
Respondents overwhelmingly supported advanced technology to improve emergency services, but were unsure whether it would be used effectively.
Only 1 percent of respondents believed that accurate location data would improve emergency response, while 20 percent believed that access to medical history would make a difference.
Craig Anderson says emergency services need to keep up with advances in technology. (ABC News: Christopher Gillett)
16% of respondents said access to wearable health data would improve emergency response.
Karin Verspool, head of RMIT University's School of Computing Technology, who reviewed the report, said these low numbers reflected public awareness of the broader AI debate.
“As soon as you start talking about AI, all the concerns that we associate with it immediately come to people's minds… of inadvertently exposing information that might be captured in the models,” Dr. Verspur said.
However, the use of these services and data will be “more targeted” in the “context of decision-making regarding emergency services”.
“We have very strong protocols in terms of how sensitive data is managed, and of course emergency services organizations that are part of our public system are expected to adhere to all of those protocols,” Dr. Verspool said.
Emergency calls via SMS, app and video
Sixty years after the Triple Zero emergency service was introduced, it remains the preferred method of contacting emergency services, with 88% of respondents favoring the telephone.
Top alternatives included SMS messaging, with 41% of respondents preferring this communication style, followed by smartphone apps at 38% and video calls at 15%.
Most older Australians surveyed preferred voice calls, while almost half of younger respondents preferred smartphone apps.
Communities expect emergency services to be able to adapt to a generational shift in the way people use their mobile phones. (ABC RN: Cathy Johnson)
Kelly Bowles, from Monash University's School of Emergency Medicine, said advances in technology for emergency services could improve response times and survival rates.
“Everything says that for the first 10 minutes. [of an emergency] It’s important,” she said.
“Every time you lose, you lose 10% of your chances of survival.
“It’s not just about getting to your destination, but hopefully the benefit of these things is that you can get as much useful information as possible in a short amount of time.”
Kelly Bowles says artificial intelligence could help improve emergency response. (Provided by: Kelly Bowles)
She also hopes that AI will help “ensure we deliver the right level of care to the right person.”
“When someone goes into cardiac arrest out of the hospital, we need to send our best clinicians to that person,” she says.
“If you can actually work with AI and other things to really understand what the person needs and send the best people, it will happen. [help] Best results. ”
Dr. Verspool agreed, saying the more information available to responders, the better.
Karin Verspoor says there are strong protocols in place to manage sensitive data. (Provided by: Karen Verspool)
For example, “Emergency services not only know where I am through GPS data, but they also have the ability to view images of the scene to understand what's going on.”
“Essentially, we can have a human integrate all of this really multifaceted information. It's much more information than you can get from a simple phone call,” she said.
Drive modernization after Triple Zero outage
Since problems emerged with Australia's emergency services, the federal government has introduced legislation to strengthen the powers of the Triple Zero Custodian, the body responsible for ensuring the system operates effectively.
In a statement to the ABC, a Telstra spokesperson said: “We are constantly looking at ways to further improve the reliability of the Triple Zero ecosystem. This includes innovations that improve speed, accuracy and resilience.”
“While technology plays an important role, human oversight and compassion remain at the heart of emergency call processing in moments of greatest need.
“We are focused on using technology to support the people doing this important work.”
The cost of frequent and severe natural disasters in Australia is estimated to have reached more than $2.2 billion in the first half of this year, according to Treasury analysis.
Public safety agencies in several states and territories want to modernize their emergency call processing and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) solutions to better support their communities, according to the report.
Poor mobile phone reception was the number three reason survey respondents (30%) said they might not contact emergency services, which is a particular concern in rural and remote communities in Australia.
In rural areas, an increasing number of people are worried about not being able to connect to Triple Zero due to poor mobile phone reception. (ABC Country: Joanna Prendergast)
Rural survey respondents were 12% more likely than suburban respondents to cite lack of cell phone reception as a reason for not being able to contact emergency services.
Respondents strongly supported deploying AI to accelerate triage and streamline resource allocation, particularly detecting important keywords in emergency calls such as “knife” and “crash” (58 percent), ranking emergency calls by urgency (55 percent), completing live translations of emergency calls in foreign languages, and identifying potential safety threats with live video footage (both 52 percent).
Professor Toby Walsh from the University of New South Wales, one of the world's leading experts on AI, said the technology had the potential to remove communication barriers in the current calling model.
Toby Walsh says advances in technology can help remove barriers to communication. (Provided by: Toby Walsh)
“People call emergency services [and] Not all of them are native speakers of English. Well, suddenly there are tools that allow those people to communicate more effectively. ”
he said.
“So it actually removes the stigma against those people.”
He said this is a “very positive story” as long as the technology is trained without bias.
“If you train a system based on previous call data, you may be remorseful and you may carry that bias forward… And training on past data may only continue to perpetuate that bias.”
