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Public safety

From helping to develop technologies that detect explosives and locate survivors in a collapsed building to video software that identifies criminals and high endurance building materials, NIST is working to keep people safe.

firefighter speaks into a handheld radio

Mission Critical Voice Communications: Your Life May Depend on It! (blog post)
A fire burns along the ground at the edge of a wooded area.

In the Eye of the Fire
PSCR firefighters for a day post for a photo in full gear in front of a fire truck

Making Fighting Fires in Virtual Reality More Like Real Reality (blog post)

News and Updates

Rendering of a building made by a 3D point cloud

Using Lasers to Save Lives

Scenario: you’re driving to your new job at a university campus and using your Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled smartphone to tell you—and your car—how

Events

Circular Economy in the High-Tech World

Wed, Jan 27 2021, 10:00am - Thu, Jan 28 2021, 5:00pm EST
This workshop will convene stakeholders from across the electronics, battery, and solar panel supply chains to assess

Industry Impacts

Two women and a man outfit another man with an exosuit.

Innovation in Exoskeletons

Long imagined in science fiction, exoskeletons that can dramatically improve and extend human performance are becoming a reality for workers on manufacturing
Photo of NIST scientists with the PSCR Deployable LTE Cell-on-Wheels

First Responder Communications

First responders must be able to communicate during an emergency. Too often in critical situations, communications among public safety agencies are hampered by

Projects and Programs

Mobile Technology Layers

Public Safety Broadband Cybersecurity

A nationwide public safety broadband network will provide public safety with the capability for securing and controlling access to the network, applications
separation personal data and public safety data pscr

Mobile Application and Data Isolation

The nationwide public safety broadband network will enable first responders to use modern mobile devices for interoperable public safety operations. While this

Publications

False Alarm Testing for Radiation Detection Systems

Author(s)
Dennis D. Leber, Leticia S. Pibida
An operator of a radiation detection system that displays a high rate of false alarms may be- come desensitized to these alarms. This action is known as alarm

Firearm examination: Examiner judgments and computer-based comparisons

Author(s)
Erwin J. Mattijssen, Cilia Witteman, Charles Berger, Xiaoyu A. Zheng, Johannes A. Soons, Reinoud Stoel
Forensic firearm examination provides the court of law with information about the source of fired cartridge cases. We assessed the validity of source decisions

Software

PSCR Haptic Challenge Environments

This Unreal Engine project has been created specifically for the PSCR Haptic Challenge. It features three different first responder scenarios that will be

LTE Coverage Tool

This experimental application was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR)

Tools and Instruments

LTE Coverage Tool

This experimental application was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR)
Smiths Detection_6046si

Cabinet x-ray system

The Smiths Detection 6046si cabinet x-ray system was designed for security screening of bags, parcels and other objects of similar size. The system runs at 160

Awards