LEBANON, Ohio — With school threats plaguing many local area schools and the recent Georgia school shooting, improving school safety is on the mind of many.
Palarum is a technology company, located in Lebanon, that is focused on tech that can help healthcare workers and patients. One of their inventions was a sock to help at-risk fall patients.
The smart sock is a sock made with conductive yarn with sensors on the bottom to detect when a patient gets out of bed. With the smart sock came the smart badge so nurses and doctors could receive alerts when the sensors detected a patient was out of bed.
“It will then find the three closest people to that room. so it does a search, in real time,” said Patrick Baker, the Palarum Founder & CEO.
After seeing a multitude of school shootings across the country, Palarum sat down and came up with a game plan to get smart badges into schools. And that is how technology to help patients in hospitals transformed into technology to help students and teachers in schools.
“Those situations just rub us clearly the wrong way, and we were really disgusted by them so we wanted to try to do something to help,” said Brian Riesenberg, the Palarum Director of Technology & Quality.
The smart badge has a teacher or staff member's name, photo, and a single button that staff members can press and trigger a level of alarms.
One click means a teacher or staff member needs assistance, and notifies the three nearest people’s bridges badges of who needs help and where they are.
Two clicks means a suspicious character is nearby or on campus. This notifies all badges and sends the school into lockdown procedures.
The last alert is triggered by holding the button down for 3 seconds, and that means there is an active threat on campus.
“It will notify everyone in the building, put them on lockdown procedures, and it will also grab pieces of data from the server and send it to 911,” said Riesenberg.
Palarum has partnered with a local school and law enforcement to test these badges over the last year. They told me the badges have helped with level one and two alerts, and help teachers feel safer.
Law enforcement also says it helps them immensely in responding.
“Having the ability to have information come in in real time, absolute location or at least last known location, cuts down on how long it takes for us to get on the scene, figure out what’s going on, that’s a game changer,” said Brian Buchanan, a local police officer & security expert.
Officer Buchanan added that knowing exactly where to go, cuts down on time, and ultimately saves lives.
