This isn’t about helping folks with an existential crisis, more about finding them when they don’t know where they are.
Medic52 partnered with What3Words to allow you to find people in an emergency without complicated and vague instructions.
What is What3Words?
Street addresses don’t exist on a mountain, parks and many rural areas. This makes it hard to find places and prevents people from describing exactly where help is needed in an emergency. What3Words divided the world into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words.
You can use this in Medic52 via the Dispatch system.
How does it work?
Using Medic52 you can send an SMS to a phone number, and in one click they can get, and read back to you the three words on their screen. They will be able to receive this SMS as you are likely on the phone to them. Check out the W3W launch post for an overview video.
Walkthrough
Start off on the Dispatch Map screen, and click the GPS button in the bottom left panel.
This pops up a panel where you can create a new incident based on the lat/long coordinates (if the caller has that level of skill and information) or by what3words.
Let’s click to ‘Send link via SMS’
Here we’ll enter the user cell phone number. This works for a phone number anywhere in the world, and is included in your plan (with fair use limits).
As you enter the phone number we’ll double check if it’s valid. This can help confirm the number first time around. This can be hard if you are speaking with someone with lots of background noise, out in the elements.
If the box is blue – don’t click on Send just yet!
The box surrounding the phone number will go green if the phone number is valid.
Now, hit send and an SMS will arrive with the user. You will also get confirmation that the SMS was sent successfully.
From the user side, they get an SMS as below.
Click on it and screen opens with a very simple interface. Note they may need to Allow sharing of their location.
After doing that the three words will be displayed.
Now it’s time to enter the 3 words that the user can see on screen. Click ‘Enter What3Words’
As you start to type the words it will suggest locations that match. Even if you don’t spell correctly, or don’t hear the word correctly from the other end.
As you can see below we didn’t spell the ‘tributes’ correctly but we are still seeing a suggestion that is in the correct area. Bonus points if you know where we are standing today. Hint its the spring rite of passage of all eastern skiiers.
Now you can check where you. pin is on the map, confirm its all correct and click ‘Create’
You can now continue with this incident as normal.
If you are curious, and don’t know where we are in the East – Tuckermans Ravine Wikipedia