RapidSOS Partners With Arlo Technologies To Reduce Home false Alarms By Leveraging AI, Video

By Donny Jackson, Editor

RapidSOS has announced a partnership with Arlo Technologies that is designed to help 911 centers validate home alarms by allowing video-centric Arlo Home Security System data to be synthesized by the RapidSOS AI-powered Harmony platform, with the intent of reducing false alarms and better informing emergency responses.

RapidSOS CEO Michael Martin said product and engineering teams from the two companies have been working together for about a year in an effort to leverage their platforms in a manner that verifies emergencies detected in homes and helps inform an appropriate public-safety response. This is especially important today, when more than 90% of all home-security alerts result in false alarms, he said.

“Public safety has had this conundrum with home security systems,” Martin said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “They want to serve their community—obviously, we want our families to feel safe their homes, because that is foundational to the communities we want to have. Yet, they can get flooded with the false alarms. So, there’s this gap between what we espouse to have and what the technology is capable of.  

“Finally letting public safety have a chance to actually see that it’s a verified incident—and, by the way, here’s a quick little image of this individual breaking into this home—it’s a game changer … Data validates and saves lives, and AI makes data accessible.”

Arlo Technologies’ video evidence can provide first responders with key insights, while the Harmony artificial-intelligence (AI) platform from RapidSOS—as well as human personnel—verifies that there is a real emergency and identifies the data points most relevant to first responders, according to Martin.

“We use a combination of AI and human safety agents. Think of this as a team that exists almost parallel to 911, where they are verifying incidents with rich data, and then they are escalating it to the appropriate public-safety agency after they verify it.

“So, verification occurs with a combination of AI, which is doing … image recognition, object detection, fusing sensor feeds, and things like that to verify whether this is a real incident or not. When there is uncertainty on that, it goes to a human who works with the homeowner or sensor feeds to verify and [if verified] then immediately escalate digitally into the hands of public safety.”

Martin said his company works with other home-security firms to get their data into 911 centers, but the Arlo Technologies approach is different.

“Arlo enters home security from the camera back, versus the folks we’ve traditionally worked with, who have started with the system forward into the camera,” Martin said. “Arlo uses a video-first approach, which is interesting as RapidSOS is really doing a lot around multimedia now, and we’re seeing public-safety agencies think about how they operationalize that and use it.

“It made sense for us to partner with one of the leaders in video on the consumer side, and they also have a lot of small and medium businesses.”

Arlo Technologies CEO Matthew McRae expressed optimism about the partnership.

“We are extremely excited to partner with RapidSOS to provide advanced emergency response capabilities such as video verification, providing first responders with the information they need to act fast and save lives,” McRae said in a prepared statement. “This partnership underscores Arlo’s relentless innovation and deep commitment to user safety. Together with RapidSOS, we will continue to develop cutting-edge features and services that further our position as the leader in the market.”

While the Arlo-RapidSOS partnership emphasizes the ability to leverage home-security video and AI, Martin noted that the RapidSOS Harmony AI platform also can synthesize data inputs from many other sources, as well.

“What’s powerful is how your various connected devices can work together—in Harmony—around an emergency to help save your life,” Martin said.

“Now, the home knows that it’s on fire, but the wearable device knows that your daughter is trapped in the northwest corner [of the home] and her respiration rates are getting challenged. We can actually start to operationalize that in an intelligent manner, so that when first responders show up to the home, they’re not trying to figure it out from ground zero. Instead, they arrive with a specific tactical plan to address that life-and-death situation.”

Martin said that the Harmony AI platform already is capable of processing such data points and synthesizing them into actionable direction for public safety, but he acknowledged that it is “not at the level we want it to be on every single incident” currently. And the possibilities continue to grow as ecosystem of IoT sensors evolve, he said.

“The cool thing is that all of these modern systems not only tell when there’s motion, but it tells you now ‘child detected,’ ‘dog detected,’ and that sort of stuff,” Martin said. “It’s much more usable.”

And the RapidSOS AI platform is not limited to synthesizing data inputs from home-security systems, which can be used to enhance the response effort, according to Martin.

“Harmony is the intelligence layer between all of these connected devices,” he said. “There’s a decent chance that, if your car is in a crash, it plugs into Harmony. Certainly your phone plugs into Harmony. If you have a wearable device and a health profile with the Red Cross, the American Heart Association or the Medicor Foundation, that plugs into Harmony.”

“God forbid, if you get into a car accident, … that data all streams into Harmony, and Harmony packages that in a way that’s actionable into RapidSOS Unite, but also into CAD, call-handling, mapping and out to the 700,000 field responders that use our app now. So now, the fire department is rolling up [to an incident], and they have that plan of attack at their fingertips.”