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An emergency on the underground? Take your shirt off...

In an emergency, the last thing that a worker on the typical underground railway would want, would be to be recognised as a railway employee. Appear Networks, which is currently "unwiring" the Paris and Stockholm underground railways, has discovered that "in an emergency, the first thing transport staff would do, would be to take their shirts off.

Xavier Aubry, VP Emea demonstrated the package of location-based services which will be rolled out over the next year, in ten Stockholm stations this year, and 100 by 2006.

The Optimobile software currently uses WiFi wireless to connect to blue-collar workers out in the field. It judges the position of a worker from the signal strength of the WLAN client, and which access point it uses; but the company says it could equally easily do this over GPRS, switching from one to the other. And it could use GPS when available, too.

"There is too much information available for a blue-collar workers to be effective," said Xavier Aubry, VP for EMEA at Appear Networks, demonstrating the equipment at Kista Science City in Stockholm today. "They can't be expected to surf and search for the information they need in any specific situation; so we have to have an infrastructure to analyse data, and push it to them."

The result is a "context sensitive" user interface, aimed at people who are not office workers, so that the right applications are available to them at the right time and place.

"For example, if a worker has been sent to a particular location to deal with a technical issue, one option is going to be the technical information about the equipment, perhaps including a circuit diagram. But when the worker moves into another location, that menu item should disappear."

The system allows the worker to use the WLAN as a "docking" system; downloading applications for later use offline - examples being a route planner for the train network, or a public information system.

"There are issues with privacy," Aubry concedes, with some workers seeing these devices as a personal tracker, rather than a useful tool, especially in the Paris metro. "The solution is to make sure that they perceive it as a powerful help to them in security situations, for example."

An example: if a worker perceives a security problem, the security menu will show the nearest colleague as a callable phone option. "They can talk to each other, and arrange to meet at a certain point."

The plan for both networks, Aubry said, is to make these services available to the general public as well as to railway employees, but the return on investment comes from the staff system.

Aubry rejected suggestions that there was any risk to the train network. "To be honest, it's the other way around; these big trains generate enormous electromagnetic interference, which we have to allow for."

Appear and Optimobile current focus on Windows Mobile hardware; there are plans to expand to other platforms like Symbian.

"We hope that for these railway services, the workers will feel that they can keep their shirts on in the case of an emergency, because they will be able to tell passengers what is going on. Currently, they have no information," said Aubry.

Appear networks web site