Now that you mention it, if there ain't no bears in an area, then I'm likely uninterested and going there.
Mark...
Severe weather or other safety alerts on your InReach, Zoleo, etc.
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Mark...
I had a similar reaction to the direction this thread is going. When I first got my inReach device, I considered it a last resort resource if a disaster situation happened, beyond the reach of civilization's influence (cellular towers, radio stations...etc), because I like to solo. I make preparations based on my experience and research for the particular area that I'm headed for or going through. The inReach device sets, almost forgotten in my gear, sort of like my high lift, winch or tire chains, available if needed, but not buzzing or setting off a cute little tone......and that's the way I like it. Hell, isn't that one thing that we're trying to get away from - phone calls, text messages, emails, tweets....etc? Guess I must be trapped in my "old school" world. One thing's for sure, though, what used to be the outback or back country is evaporating faster than I ever expected it to.Anytime I or any of "my guys" heads out solo up here, in a rig or afoot, we always reach out to someone within our circle and make sure that they know where we are going, when we plan to be back, when we want them to be concerned if we are not and a handful of other info as appropriate. We have taken to calling it "Nanny Duty". BUT... it is "Nanny" only in terms of them being responsible to be a basic overwatch to either come looking or set things in motion if we do not return on schedule. And with the Sat-Comms that most of us have these days, it really is a last resort type of thing for the most part.
My point? If I had some sort of electronic device that beeped and buzzed and gave me suggestions to the degree that is suggested here... I would toss it under the tires before the first river crossing.
If I NEEDED this sort of intrusive Karening... I would stay home. Or actually probably not even have any desire to be out in the field in the first place.
Yeah I know you were not suggesting ALL of this... just spit balling. I get that. But seriously, Wow! If you have to be told that there are snakes where you are going? Stay home. If you do not know that there are no medical services where you are going? Stay home. If you don't know where to find drinkable water... ya better be carrying enough in the first place. If there have been enough people fishing in a lake to pass the word along whether it is good or not... That is NOT the lake I am gonna be fishing in anyway.And telling me that I am too far from my camp or how to get back to it? If I can't figure that out myself, I've got no business being in the field.
I doubt that a service such as is proposed in this thread has much applicability to me and my world. But even if it did, the last thing I would want is some sort of over the top 24/7 AI powered app to tuck me in and make sure my milk was warm and the nightlight is turned on..
The service as suggested by the OP seems like it might be a decent tool for the more urban/suburban folks that only get out occasionally and don't have a lot of time afield under their belt and/or are not familiar with the areas they might be spending time in or how to access the various sources of info that are available to us all. But load it up too much with fluff and most of us are gonna relegate it to the "Van Life bikini butt picture taking IG Influencer crowd" (Not that have have anything against a good bikini butt pic.)
Just my two cents worth, your mileage may vary and all that other stuff.
Mark...
No disrespect intended for what the OP and some here are intending. My lifestyle doesn't require me to be "on the grid" constantly. I think that some folks use these satellite devices to stay in touch socially and/or want to be warned of every conceivable environment that they traveling to. They're obviously trying to "get away from it all", but don't stop to realize that the data bases that supply info for the apps or services rendered require recent input by people that have been there, or are there ahead of them.
- Thread starter
- #23
No disrespect taken! This conversation has gone in weird and interesting directions … as forum conversation sometimes go.
I am not surprised at all and fully respect the view that WE (myself included) head into the wilderness to disconnect and unplug.
At the same time, many of us are taking our Satcom devices to enhance our safety … because, after all, one of the appeals of the wilderness is to challenge ourselves, including taking on some risk. ( Don't get me started on risk … driving to the trailhead is likely the riskiest thing we do. ) It’s not that long ago many of us didn’t even see the need for Satcom. Our expectations, and likely those of loved ones, are changing or have changed, for better or worse.
Adiona Alert is just offering a service to offer an additional layer of safety by proving severe weather and similar alerts, which many of us see value in, but in the wilderness area.
Going back to the core of our mission, wildfires, flash floods, and tsunamis are an increasing reality in many wilderness areas!
We want to provide information so our users can make informed risk decisions to protect their gear, their family and friends, and themselves!
If it’s not a service you see value in, I FULLY respect that! I also know, for example, that some families have difficult conversations about heading into wilderness areas during wildfire season and change their plans because not everyone has the same level of risk knowledge or tolerance. And then, if you are an employer, you have a legal responsibility to your employees to manage the risks they face.
The most rewarding part of our conversations with our users, with communities like this, is that they inform us how we can offer a valuable service to many of you. For this, I thank you all!
Lastly, let me chime in on privacy and tracking because that’s ALWAYS a touchy topic! We have a robust privacy policy that you can view here - Privacy Policy | Adiona Alert - https://adionaalert.com/privacy . In essence, we monitor your current location and only retain your location information associated with the alert sent to your device. We hope users will see sharing their location with us as they do with Garmin or their other service provider. I suspect that in this day and age, we all have already shared more location information about our adventures through the site reservation we made, the gas we purchased with our credit card, the cell phone apps we use, etc.… I’m sure you get the picture.
Now, maybe another time I can all tell you about the juvenile wolverine that came into camp at 2 AM making sure that we kept a clean site … Yes to snakes, yes to bears, but don’t forget the wolverine
I’ll be here all week and maybe even next and look forward to this conversation continuing
J.S.
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I really like this idea for true adverse weather/incident alerts. I think this business has potential in being acquired by Garmin and incorporated into their offering if successful.
Severe storms, tsunamis, and wildfires are the three that come to mind from my geographical area.
On the other hand, I would not like to be bombarded while disconnected. Something like the Amber Alerts we get here on our cell phones irks me very much (blanket alert with incredibly limited scope and relevance). Especially that I’m usually on the 10 messages a month plan and paying for random alerts for no reason (in addition to whatever the service might cost in the future) would be annoying.
Maybe one could select the type of alerts desired as well as the area one is travelling to? The worst would be to get a completely irrelevant alert and freak out beyond cell phone service and the ability to confirm/deny said danger exists.
Severe storms, tsunamis, and wildfires are the three that come to mind from my geographical area.
On the other hand, I would not like to be bombarded while disconnected. Something like the Amber Alerts we get here on our cell phones irks me very much (blanket alert with incredibly limited scope and relevance). Especially that I’m usually on the 10 messages a month plan and paying for random alerts for no reason (in addition to whatever the service might cost in the future) would be annoying.
Maybe one could select the type of alerts desired as well as the area one is travelling to? The worst would be to get a completely irrelevant alert and freak out beyond cell phone service and the ability to confirm/deny said danger exists.
- Thread starter
- #25
Hey Janyyc,
I fully agree with you about being able to select the alerts you wish to receive, as we all have different use cases.
We are still working hard on developing our service, and one area we will work with our early users over the coming weeks is to understand what alerts they want to receive and what options they need to opt out of certain alerts. We also want to be able to create some "profiles" to allow our users to select from the various alerts, depending on their activity, etc., that they can then customize further. It has to be easy but also customizable.
To develop this properly, we need to work with our early users and not simply pick what works for us. That work is already underway, but the feedback you're providing really helps - thank you!
For our service to be valuable, we must avoid "alert fatigue." We are also mindful that some of our users have a limited number of messages they subscribe to.
As an example, this week, one of our users was in Southern California and received the High Surf Warning issued hours before the incidents that made the news where monster waves washed away people and vehicles. If you spend your time in the mountains, a high surf warning might not be on your radar, while if you’re a surfer chasing waves, you might know very well about the high surf but don’t need a warning. We need time to figure out those use cases and the “alert profile” that is best suited for those users.
We are a small (but mighty) team juggling everything you'd expect a small tech startup to do. But our users and their experience are the priority.
I'd be happy to discuss this further and welcome you to apply to our Early Access program.
Let me know if you have any questions.
J.S.
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- Thread starter
- #26
This is just a quick update to those following this thread concerning some of the information I provided earlier.
We recently introduced a change to automatically suspend sending alerts to your device if your location has not been updated in 48 hours. As soon as our service receives a location update after this automatic pause, you will begin receiving any alerts currently in effect or issued for your updated location.
Part of our challenge is the need to continue delivering alerts to your device even after it has stopped updating your location.
Consider a scenario where your device is no longer updating your location because its battery has died or because you have settled for the night in an area with very limited satellite connectivity, such as a narrow canyon or very heavy tree canopy.
It is essential for us to resume sending you alerts once your device is available again, after you have charged your device or once you are back on the trail. This ensures that you will receive important alerts as soon as we can provide them.
We are working with our early users to determine how long after your last location update we should stop delivering alerts to your device since 48 hours might not be right.
Just curious, I can see severe storms and wildfires affecting your "geographic area", but if I'm not mistaken Alberta is landlocked. No disrespect intended, but how would people in Alberta be concerned about a tsunami? Sure, you'd want to be warned if traveling in a coastal area, but that's not what you said.
Also, FYI - you can turn off alerts such as the Amber alert you speak of (In the government alerts section in Settings, Notifications - scroll to the bottom). At least on an iPhone in the USA, not sure on androids or any phone in Canada. I agree, they used to irk me, until I turned them off.
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I wasn’t specific enough regarding my “geographic area”, I meant the area I generally travel in (which includes the coast of BC).
Unfortunately in Canada we are unable to turn off Amber Alerts.
I like where your headspace is with your product but I do have some quesitons/concerns.
1) What is your data retention and privacy policies..what's to prevent some malicious actor from using your lat/lon conditions to know if you're home or where you are going. Privacy seems to be the name of the game and with that also comes high-security.
2) What kind of data refresh cycles are you looking at...are the data sources you are using pig-backing off open source APIs or using proprietary data aggregation with some algorithms on top? I find that many open source data repos have poor data quality and very long updates with current data. Also, do you guarantee accurate predictions for an hour/day/week and within that kind of fidelity (grid, county, state, country?)
1) What is your data retention and privacy policies..what's to prevent some malicious actor from using your lat/lon conditions to know if you're home or where you are going. Privacy seems to be the name of the game and with that also comes high-security.
2) What kind of data refresh cycles are you looking at...are the data sources you are using pig-backing off open source APIs or using proprietary data aggregation with some algorithms on top? I find that many open source data repos have poor data quality and very long updates with current data. Also, do you guarantee accurate predictions for an hour/day/week and within that kind of fidelity (grid, county, state, country?)
- Thread starter
- #30
Those are excellent questions carboncycle, and aspects of our service we have taken great care considering and implementing.
Privacy
We appreciate your sensitivity and are committed to respecting and protecting your privacy. Our service monitors and retains ONLY the most recent location provided by your satellite communication provider (Garmin, Zoleo, etc.) and uses that information location to check against our database of active alerts. We discard that location once our servers obtain an updated location, and the process continues, always only retaining your most current location.
We also retain your location information associated with each alert we send to your device for diagnostic and liability reasons.
State-of-the-art, industry-leading cloud computing providers host our service and the data we collect, and we meet or exceed recommended or required data security practices.
You can also review our privacy policy here - Privacy Policy | Adiona Alert - https://adionaalert.com/privacy
Safety Alert Sources and Their Reliability
Now, to the more complex and technical question about how and where we source the alerts we monitor and deliver to your device when you are inside an affected area.
We do NOT use "open" or "public" sources, such as media or information aggregators - we go to the source of the alerts ONLY and use vetted and secure data feeds that several government agencies operate.
The bulk of the alerts are weather watches and warnings issued by the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) and Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian counterpart to the NWS. These alerts range from flood and winter weather watches to severe thunderstorms or tornado warnings. In other regions, these could be flash flooding, wind warnings, frost warnings, etc.
Both agencies are also sources for tsunami warnings. In many regions of the U.S., the NWS also issues avalanche warnings when the conditions warrant it.
Given that our focus is on providing these critical alerts in remote or wilderness areas, away from large population centres, we know that the public weather agency takes great care to offer these safety alerts regardless of the commercial interests that might be a challenge for commercial alert providers, who primarily get their severe weather information from the public forecasters anyways.
In addition, we monitor other safety alerts issued by State, Provincial, Tribal, regional or local public safety agencies that address a comprehensive range of hazards. Those alerts include drinking water advisories, active shooters, chemical releases, dam failures, missing persons, dangerous animals - you name it. The key is that these alerts are issued when the local agency, which has the local knowledge and jurisdiction, believes the public would benefit from being notified of a significant risk in their community.
We source the alerts from several feeds managed by various government agencies, including FEMA in the U.S. and Public Safety Canada, and other feeds like the NWS weather alert feeds.
In all cases, the information and alerting agency is curated and vetted, and the feed is secured to ensure you get trusted and reliable information.
To give you a sense of how comprehensive the alerts issued by public agencies can be, a few weeks ago, we recorded the highest number of active alerts at one time since we launched our Early Access program. At one point on December 18th, we were monitoring nearly 900 active safety alerts, ranging from Blizzard Warnings in Alaska and some parts of Canada to Small Craft Advisories on the coast of southern Florida and Hawaii, not to mention the numerous Rainfall and Flood warnings on the west coast of Canada and the U.S.
One of the objectives of our Early Access program is to learn from our users what information is valuable to them and will help them stay safe in the backcountry.
We are continually reviewing the alerts we issue and what alerts that aren't currently available that would benefit our users. Your feedback will also inform our future development plans for other safety information we want to offer but still need to integrate.
Location Accuracy and Alert Timeliness
The location accuracy of the alerts you receive is determined by the accuracy of the location reported by your Garmin, Zoleo or other device, which is dependent on the quality of the GPS signal but is generally accurate to between 10-100’ and the update frequency you’ve set for your device. Suppose you travel quickly, such as in a vehicle, and have long location update intervals. In that case, your location accuracy will be much lower than if you are on a human-powered adventure with a frequent update interval.
Regardless, we will use your location and compare it to the affected area determined by the alerting agency. If you are in the affected area when the alert is issued, we will immediately send you the alert. At the same time, if your travels take you to an area where an alert was previously issued, we will send you the alert as soon as your location is updated by your device and our service determines you are inside the area subject of the alert.
As a result, the two main factors affecting the timeliness of the alerts you receive are the frequency of the location updates you set for your device and the delay in the satellite communication system. There are also some data processing delays in receiving the alerts from the alerting agency, our data processing logic, and the location matching process, but they are essentially immaterial to delaying the notification process.
In practice, I’ve seen alerts received by our test units as quickly as two or three minutes after the NWS issued them to other circumstances where the satellite link was more challenging because of tree cover or the unit sitting on the dash of a car when the message was delayed fifteen or twenty minutes.
Lastly, the alert type is an essential element of timeliness - last week, during the monster waves event in Southern California, the warnings were issued by the NWS hours and received by one of our early users well before the hazardous conditions occurred, providing plenty of time to take protective actions. Other alerts are issued for much more dynamic conditions, such as severe thunderstorms that lead to an outbreak of tornado activity. In such a case, a severe thunderstorm watch would likely be issued hours earlier to the severe weather outbreak, followed by appropriate warnings issued from 15-20 minutes to an hour or more before the “arrival” of the storm, then followed by upgraded warnings, including an observed tornado warning several minutes or more before a storm arrives in the affected area. Such a storm is more challenging for the alerting agency, us, and our users, but this highlights the importance of severe weather watches issued ahead of a period of severe weather.
I’ve attached an excellent image from the NWS that might help you understand how the affected geographic area of a severe weather warning might look to help you get a sense of what we are using.
I wish I could provide an “easy” answer to the technology and science behind severe weather and other safety alerts. Still, it’s a complex topic where the effort is about risk reduction.
I hope this helps you understand the service we are rolling out. Let me know if you have any questions.
J.S.
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