Weekend. Foggy. Earphones.
Three seemingly unconnected words were the vital coordinates needed to help rescue a mother and her daughter in remote rural Somerset in the United Kingdom after a car crash.
These ‘coordinates’ are part of an algorithm that was developed by UK-based startup what3words, which divides the world into 57 trillion 3m x 3m (97 square feet) areas, and gives each ‘block’ a unique three-word address.
The technology was originally developed to help the millions of people (both in the UK and globally) who live in remote and impoverished areas, who do not have a postcode, to gain an address. This would have originally allowed them to order goods and services.
But the attraction and benefits of this geo-location service gained the attention of emergency services and has been adopted by main police services throughout the UK, as well as by Transport Police in other areas.
This is a really exciting development, and should in my opinion, be much more widely adopted and used. To expect people in distress to be able to accurately, and in detail, describe to emergency services exactly where they are is naively optimistic, and has no doubt been an issue for years.
This is a sentiment that what3wwords co-founder Chris Sheldrick echoes; he told the BBC: “Being in need of urgent help and not being able to easily describe where you are can be very distressing for the person involved and a really difficult situation for emergency services.”
How does the system work? Call handlers can send people who ring them a text message that contains a link to the what3words map, where they can see their location and immediately read the corresponding three-word address. And help can then be sent to that precise location.
Whether the system becomes more widely adopted remains to be seen, but it will be exciting to see the future applications of these technology that has already helped disaster relief efforts, emergencies at festivals, and emergencies in rural UK.
