U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. -- A tracking system played a part in keeping hundreds of cadets safe and on course as they navigated their way through a major cadet competition here April 29-30.
The 400 cadets competing in Polaris Warrior stayed connected via Virtual Badge, a system that identifies credentials, tracks individual and troop movements, and can compile information on large activities, including natural or manmade disasters.
“Virtual Badge is a Smartphone-based technology system used to provide data reports from the field to track events or people,” said David LaRivee, an associate professor in the Economics and Geoscience Department here.
Cadet 1st Class Kirk Stiers use the technology to accurately score Polaris Warrior. Stiers said he set up the system to accommodate the annual competition, designed to test skills cadets could need in deployed environments after they graduate.
“Virtual Badge fulfills our needs for efficiency, accountability and security, while empowering cadets by introducing them to real-world technology used by agencies such as the Coast Guard and the Army Reserve,” he said.
Stiers said cadets use the system to streamline competition scoring into a “real-time, efficient and environmentally friendly process,” while offering GPS tracking to Cadet Wing staff who track cadets through the competition.
“The system encompasses features for command and control by allowing messages from the Cadet Wing Command Center to be pushed directly to the mobile devices [carried by team leaders] in the field, based on necessary criteria in the event of an emergency,” he said.
LaRivee said cadets are advancing the system to improve operations for the Air Force and civilian first-responders.
The technology has been “around for years,” he said. In 2013 year, the Academy signed a research agreement with Disaster Solutions, LLC. a software consulting firm specializing in emergency reporting that owns the copyright to Virtual Badge. Since then, Virtual Badge has popped-up in various cadet capstone projects.
“One cadet capstone project had cadets working with Broward County officials in Florida to develop plans to track the economic recovery and conduct pre-flood planning after a hurricane,” LaRivee said.
LaRivee used Virtual Badge while responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010; the earthquake near the town of Léogâne, Haiti, 16 miles west of the capitol city Port-au-Prince in January 2010; and the tsunami caused by a mid-ocean earthquake that tore through the coastal town of Tohoku, Japan, in March 2011. He said Virtual Badge was used in all three crises to give first responders accurate information while compiling their reports.