Rave Guardian Keeps Students Safe with GPS

Rave Wireless, announced the introduction of its upgraded Rave Guardian product. Rave Guardian is a personal safety tool that lets students use their mobile phone to instantly share location and critical safety information with campus security, whenever and wherever they’re in distress. With the new release, available later this spring, Rave Guardian will become accessible to all students at participating universities, on any cell phone or service provider of a student’s choice. The new Rave Guardian utilizes location information from various sources including GPS data when available.

Rave Guardian is simple to use both for students and campus security staff. For example, a student who’s walking across campus late at night can activate the Rave Guardian timer directly from his cell phone if/when he’s feeling uncomfortable or unsafe. When the student reaches his destination safely, he deactivates the Guardian timer and campus police will not be alerted. If the student hits the Rave Guardian panic button or the timer expires prior to deactivation, however, campus police are immediately notified. Rave Guardian provides “best available” student location information to campus police. If the student uses a carrier that provides GPS data access, Rave Guardian will automatically display the student’s location on a big-screen console in the campus safety center and/or on Windows Mobile devices for officers in the field. This allows campus police to know when a student needs help, and to respond to the situation more quickly and with more information.

“Rave Wireless is committed to maximizing the value of the mobile phone as a safety tool by offering multiple solutions for increasing the security of entire campuses, select groups of students, as well as individual students,” says Raju Rishi, chief strategy officer and co-founder, Rave Wireless, Inc. “Through our multi-year relationships with university partners and extensive knowledge of mobile technologies we believe our Rave Guardian upgrade enables universities to leverage the mobile phone to the fullest extent in support of total campus safety.”

Rave Guardian works in tandem with Rave Alert for a complete mobile phone safety solution. Rave Alert provides campus administrators with an easy and reliable way to send multi-modal broadcast text, email and/or recorded voice alerts to the entire campus or select groups. It’s a hosted solution that can be up and running within days and its fully redundant infrastructure results in 99+ percent delivery rates. Universities using Rave Alert prioritize its use for emergency response which ranges from Clery Act incidents such as violent crimes, to severe weather events, to power outages. Rave Alert is also used to issue academic and/or administrative updates to specific groups of students.