The Home Office has highlighted the development of a new app to keep people safe in crowded places and indicated it will soon come into use in a part of central London.
Named The Krowd, the app has been developed with an award of almost £250,000 from the Home Office and comes from the first project to be launched publicly under a scheme set up in response to the terror attacks in 2017.
It has been created by Devon based developers KrowdThink and enables people in crowded places to speak directly with on-site security teams and to send images to provide assistance. This gives the public the ability to report suspicious activity or potential threats in real time using their phones.
Security staff are able to use a venue mapping feature to locate a perceived threat and rapidly respond to the situation. The app can also allow security staff to message the people at a venue directly, guiding them to safety.
The Krowd was developed as part of the Improving Crowd Resilience (ICR) competition, which was launched in July 2017 and forms part of the Government’s efforts to do more with the private sector to tackle the security challenges facing the UK. It sought to fund innovative projects which would train the public to spot and report security threats.
First to market
The app is the first example of an ICR funded project reaching market and will become available for use at the Broadgate Quarter in the City of London in the next few weeks.
Security Minister Ben Wallace said: “We are bringing government and industry together to develop tools designed to keep us all safe as we go about our day-to-day lives.
“I am delighted that this initiative has already started to yield some ground-breaking technologies, like this app, and I look forward to further such innovations.”
The ICR was run by the Defence and Security Accelerator, a cross-government organisation, launched in December 2016 that funds innovations to support UK defence and security.
Image by James Cridland, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
