Home > KU Medical Center Installs Real-time Beacon System

News

KU Medical Center Installs Real-time Beacon System

8/13/2008

Bookmark and Share

The University of Kansas Medical Center has installed a new system from Alertus Technologies that notifies students, faculty, staff and visitors on campus in the case of an emergency. The primary communication tools in the new system are wall-mounted "beacons," which function as a way for the KU Medical Center Police Department to communicate with the campus in real time. The units are located in every classroom and on every floor in university buildings. If activated, the beacons display flashing red lights and sound sirens, and directions are given on the units' text boards.

The system will be used in the event of severe weather that requires immediate action, situations that affect public safety, or environmental dangers to the campus.

"The safety of everyone on our campus is, of course, our highest priority," said Ed Phillips, vice chancellor for administration. "This notification system ensures quick and clear communication in an emergency and is one way we're helping to keep those on our campus safe."

In the event of an emergency, the communication to campus from the KUMC Police Department is threefold: the Alertus Notification Beacons are activated; an e-mail is sent to university students, faculty, and staff; and a text message is sent to the cell phones of members of the campus community who have opted in to the text messaging alert service.

Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, another Alertus customer, installed its beacon system in late 2007.


Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.

Cite this Site

Dian Schaffhauser, "KU Medical Center Installs Real-time Beacon System," Campus Technology, 8/13/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=66299

copy text (above) for proper citation



Recommended Reading
  • Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck

    Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.

  • U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells

    The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.

  • George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum

    George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.

  • Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator

    The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.

  • ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard

    ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.

  • Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month

    Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.