What he found was nothing short of extraordinary. Adam, and the rest of the school administrators at Prescott High School, now have unprecedented insight into what is happening on their campus the instant it is happening. They can react in real-time and respond to events immediately, preventing harmful safety situations in a way they’d never been able to before.
Raising School Safety Standards: The Benefits of VOLT AI
The team at Prescott High School have found numerous benefits from using VOLT’s technology. Some of these they expected, and some they didn’t.
Immediate Awareness
The most important benefit for Adam and his team has been immediate awareness of things that they’ve never before been able to monitor. The system sends immediate notifications to designated members of school personnel's devices (including smartwatches) when it detects potential issues, making it easier than ever to monitor school security.
Triggers that have proven helpful in minimizing school safety issues:
- Person down detection: Ability to identify and alert staff when someone is on the ground, potentially in distress.
- Weapon detection: Volt.ai’s technology is capable of identifying threats from weapons, including when they're held at a person's side, and if desired contact law enforcement automatically.
- Fight detection: School staff can tell immediately when a fight has broken out or recognize an incident of bullying and respond immediately instead of retro-actively, keeping school violence to a minimum.
- Prevention of unwanted access: Customized rules allow the staff to detect unwanted access during specific times or at specific locations that have helped detect theft and other undesirable activities.
- Crowd detection: Ability to identify unusual crowd buildups in hallways or other areas to alert to a potential issue that needs immediate addressing.
- Customizable emergency management rules: The customization of rules, including which staff members to notify about which events, or even when to automatically notify law enforcement allows Prescott High School to enact their own unique strategy for security and safety, fitting the needs of their campus.
Some specific examples of improved school safety that Prescott High has seen in action:
- Person down detection: This particular feature has helped identify a student in distress, suffering from an asthma attack while in a hallway with no staff present. Nurse response was available to the student within 15 seconds due to the immediate notification to staff.
- Weapon detection: While, thankfully, no incidents have occurred with real weapons, the wooden rifles used by the school’s ROTC unit are all immediately recognized, a fascinating test of this important feature.
- Unwanted access: This feature has helped detect theft of equipment immediately and allowed fast action; in addition to catching loitering and cases of students being present in areas of the school grounds that they shouldn’t be.
- Crowd detection: This feature has helped compound the support of the fight detection feature to identify fights or incidents occurring in areas where cameras cannot be present (like locker rooms) by detecting the formation and movement of large crowds toward those areas, allowing staff to break up fights in a matter of seconds.
- Fight detection: This feature allows staff to break up fights, while they may happen infrequently, significantly faster than prior to having access to the technology.
Signal to Noise Ratio
To date, nearly every alert, while it may not signal a life or death situation, has been useful information for Adam and his team to manage the campus. They do not suffer from “notification overload” and have benefited greatly from learning new information from each alert.
Privacy for Students
Because the system is looking for anomalous behavior, and does not use facial recognition to track individuals in any way, it has maintained the privacy it is important to provide students.
The system can track individuals based on gait and movement without using facial recognition, looking for concerning activities but never looks for individuals. This particular feature has helped to ensure parents, and the community at large, are comfortable with the use of the technology.
Great Partners Today, and into the Future
Needless to say, Prescott High School and Volt.ai will work together to maintain and continue to improve school safety standards for years to come.