Fixing Kenya's Fire Service Click

That's all the sport -

now it's time for Click.

This week: Fighting fires...

Naked navigation...

And a real-life Rocketeer.

On Click we often look out

for technology which can help

save people's lives.

This week: Fighting fires...

For example, we went to Rwanda

to look at how drones were speeding

up deliveries of blood and recently,

closer to home, I looked

at how the response times

of the Air Ambulance in London

were being improved

by better connectivity.

If you live in the developed world,

you will probably take it

for granted that you can dial

the emergency number, someone

will answer and help will arrive.

Well, in Kenya, that's not the case.

In the capital, Nairobi, alone,

there are more than 50 different

numbers for different ambulance

services and if you need

a fire engine, well,

that's at least a dozen more,

and even then there is no guarantee

they'll be able to get to you.

Well, Kate Russell has been

to Nairobi to meet a couple

of entrepreneurs who have had

the great idea of amalgamating them

all into one service.

Think Uber for emergency services.

For most living in a modern

metropolis, calling

an ambulance involves dialling

a single short code.

But in a city of more

than 6 million people,

Nairobi has no functioning

central emergency number.

With five public hospitals

and dozens of private hospitals

and clinics all operating

independently, you have to know

who to call if you need an ambulance

here and hope that there's someone

on duty to pick up.

Caitlin and Maria run

a start-up in Nairobi hoping

to address this problem.

You just take for granted that 911

exists and we did as well.

Both of us had lived here for years

and we never even considered it

and we'd worked in health

and I never even thought

what I would do in an emergency.

We just started asking people,

have you seen an ambulance before,

who has an ambulance?

We would go and meet and find

ambulances in parking lots

and we started a really simple tally

of how many ambulances

we could find.

We realised there were so many

ambulances and nobody has any

idea where they are.

Flare's aim is to connect emergency

response vehicles on an Uber style

platform that can route calls

to the operator that

can get there quickest.

When the call comes in I get to know

the patient's location,

I click on the location.

We see all the vehicles that

are within my range.

I can select our ambulance service,

which is six minutes away.

Let's click on the ambulance service

I'm going to dispatch,

it gives me the contact number

and their current location

and the estimated time.

It also gives me the

direct route for them.

So you've been using this system

through states of emergency,

for example the first elections.

We used it for the election

of 2017, and we also had

a backup for the radios.

We had the emergency services

covering all the emergency

situations that had arised.

Sorry, sorry?

Laya, emergency!

A busy city hospital,

we left Patrick to his work

and headed out onto the streets

to see first-hand the traffic

problems that make this kind

of operator routeing a lifesaver.

This was especially important

when violence broke out

during the October elections.

Flare's ambulances were

33% busier attending

to emergencies in these hotspots.

The response times we've seen have

gone down from 162 minutes,

which is the average,

which is nearly three

hours, which is insane,

to about 15 to 20 minutes.

So far the platform has 30

ambulances online with a goal

to reach at least 50 by the end

of January next year.

An annual membership fee gives

patients access to the emergency

hotline and covers the cost of any

callouts, which otherwise would have

had to be paid by credit card before

an ambulance is dispatched.

The fee is currently around $15-20

but Flare say this might change

as the service matures.

Eventually Flare wants to add

more concierge style

features for its members,

like real-time updates

and treatment information.

The data being collected might also

prove useful to help co-ordinate

better service across the city.

One of the things we recently

learned is there's a lack

of ambulances between 7am and 9am

and the reason for that is

that the night team is handing over

to the day team so all providers

are doing that shift change,

so there's a delay in that happening

so then there aren't enough

ambulances online to actually

respond to the emergencies.

You can use that information and go

to all the providers and say,

maybe stagger your times?

Completely, or make the handover

process more efficient

so that doesn't even occur.

Fire means even bigger problems

for emergency callouts in Nairobi.

As well as the fractured

co-ordination issues

seen with ambulances,

there's a desperate shortage

of trucks and water supplies.

Tragedies like this in Nairobi's

vast clothes market, Gikomba,

are all too common and often left

burning for much longer

than they should be

because of a simple lack

of access to resources.

999 goes directly to

the police headquarters,

to the police control room.

Once you call the police control

room, they start looking

for the nearest ambulance service

or the nearest fire service.

There's no radio linkage anywhere.

The phones they have belong

to four individuals.

The fire and ambulance service

are controlled separately

by different players.

ICT Fire and Rescue is the first

firefighting school

of its kind in Kenya.

I went to visit them and got

to try out some training.

Flare is working with the school

to add as many firetrucks

as possible to their Nairobi

coverage, as well as locating

available public and private water

supplies to add to the map.

There are enough hydrants

in Nairobi theoretically,

they were planned for,

but a lot of the hydrants

have been built on top

of so we are surveying Nairobi

to see where there are publicly

available hydrants and where there

are private hydrants are that we can

actually tap into.

At this stage it's unclear how

the membership funding model

will play out for fire cover

as callout costs could be radically

higher and more variable

than ambulance work.

Flare has high hopes of becoming

the 911 equivalent for the whole

of Kenya in the future.

Kate Russell in Nairobi solving

a problem that really needs solving.

I have to say that's not always

the case in the world of technology.

Take, for example, smart cities,

which we haven't really proved

we actually need, so far.

But authorities in Canada have

teamed up with a massive tech name

to develop a smart neighbourhood

that it says will massively improve

sustainability and affordability.

Paul Carter has been

to Toronto to find out more

about Google's grand designs.

Google's parent company,

Alphabet, has its fingers

in many technological pies,

from home automation, to search,

to life sciences and autonomous

vehicles but now the company has

an even bigger idea -

it wants to build a whole new city.

Well, sort of.

Authorities in Canada's

largest city, Toronto,

have announced a partnership

with Google stablemate Sidewalk Labs

to design a new waterfront area

known as Quayside.

Sidewalk Labs say they want to see

a city built from the Internet up.

What does that look like?

Streets will come alive

with a vitality we expect

from sort of the greatest urban

environments in a way that has never

actually been seen before.

The plans include modular buildings

that will automatically

adapt to wind and rain.

Robot delivery services,

underground rubbish disposal trains,

heated roads to melt the snow,

digital navigation systems,

smart traffic, self-driving buses.

So far, so Jetsons, but will any

ordinary people actually be able

to afford to live there?

What's really interesting

when you sit down with the Sidewalk

people is that a big part

of what they want to do and a big

part of the advertisement they

present for themselves is that this

will lower the cost of living.

They're trying to find ways

to reduce your cost of mobility, so,

for example, you don't actually have

to have a car at all.

These plans also rely

on data and lots of it.

Sensors in all aspects

of the development -

buildings, roads, open spaces -

will measure how and when people

use the environment.

In a week when it was revealed

Android phones were sending location

data back to Google,

should people be concerned

about their privacy?

They have a profit motive

and a business purpose for existence

that you have to make sure

at all times you safeguard

the public interest and that's our

job on everything we do.

They made it very clear that

even though they are part

of the Alphabet organisation,

which includes other technologies,

like Waymo is their driverless

car autonomous vehicle,

they are under no pressure or no

directive from Alphabet to have

to use their technology.

They believe that to

fulfil their objectives,

they want to get the best in class,

the most innovative technologies,

wherever they may be.

Both Waterfront Toronto

and Sidewalk Labs now have a year

to thrash out the finer details

of the plan.

Any time you do anything

complicated, I was deputy mayor

of New York for the six years right

after 9/11, my responsibilities

included the rebuilding

of the World Trade Center site,

you're never going to get unanimity,

but that's what the democratic

process is all about,

about putting ideas out there,

getting feedback, adjusting them

and ultimately hopefully winning

over enough people that

you can move forward.

At the moment this smart city

of the future exists only

in drawings and documents.

City planners and technologists

from around the world will be

watching with interest to see

if Google's grand plans ever make it

from concept to construction.

Hello and welcome

to the week in tech.

It was the week that US prosecutors

charged an Iranian man

with hacking into HBO,

leaking scripts for everyone's

favourite TV show, Game of Thrones,

and demanding over £4

million in ransom.

Elsewhere, Skype disappeared

from app stores in China

after the government said it did not

comply with the local law.

The long-running net neutrality

debate took another turn this week

as US regulators rolled back

the laws that were brought

in under President Obama.

The chairman of the Federal

Communications Commission said

the changes would stop the Federal

government micromanaging

the Internet.

Critics argue the changes could lead

to unequal access to the Internet.

And humans and machine

have once again been

pitted against each other,

this time in the battle

of the drone pilots.

Researchers at NASA's jet propulsion

lab set up a time trial

between their artificial

intelligence and drone

pilot Ken Loo.

Loo was the winner when it came

to speed but was less consistent

overall than the AI system.

It wouldn't be Click

news without a robot.

This fine specimen stands at 5'1"

and calls itself THRC3.

The bot is designed to mirror

the movements of its human overlord

and may one day be used in locations

too dangerous for humans.

That's all fine before it gets fed

up and goes on strike, citing

an inhospitable working environment!

Earlier in the show we saw

how a smart city can be

built from the ground up

but you still need to be able

to find your way around it.

I've been looking at some

of the latest augmented reality that

aims to help but first,

I need to go and find the man

who knows all about it.

But he is not the only

person I am meeting.

HotStepper is a way-finding app

that uses this scantily

clad character to guide

you to your designated destination.

It is doing so by combining AR,

geolocation data, and mapping,

and while it is not the only app

to overlay directions

on the real world, it certainly

has a unique character.

He is just doing a dance.

As people are walking past the pub.

You must be Luke.

Lara, good to meet you.

You too.

Why am I following this man around?

Why have you designed

him looking like this?

After the year we have had in 2017

I think we needed some humour

so I wanted to make it more

interesting to get from A to B.

There are lots of navigation apps

out there, why are people

going to choose this one?

Some people find maps

on their phones quite

complicated to use.

We have also put in gigantic 3D

arrows at the end of the roads

you can follow him and see

from the arrows

where you want to go.

There are some challenges,

we don't actually know where a road

begins and a pavement stops we have

to kind of do our best to calculate

where we think it is.

To make it look as believable

as possible, what we do

is try to find out where we think

you are, what the weather

is like where you are,

if it is sunny or cloudy and then

specifically, the location

of the sun and if we can work

out where the sun is,

we can render his shadow naturally

to where it should be.

But when you are not having fun

on foot then maybe you are trying

to find a place to leave your car.

AR measuring app Air Measure

are prototyping a function

to help you parallel park.

Not something you would

want any inaccuracy on.

In the meantime, it can be used

for measuring furniture,

creating a floor plan,

or seeing how tall you are.

But if you are more focused

on finding your way around and have

taken a shine to HotStepper,

just don't lose your friend

or you may lose your way.

OK, you cannot miss the arrow

but where has my man gone?

Where is he?

The way we talk online has changed

in the last decade and I'm not

talking about the rise of social

networks like Facebook and Twitter,

but the even bigger explosion

in mobile messaging apps

like WhatsApp, Line

and WeChat depending

on where you are in the world.

Since 2014 we have been

using them even more

than the big social networks.

And with all of those people

spending all of that time chatting,

rather than browsing,

it is not surprising that companies

are desperate to talk to us too.

And I can only mean

one thing - bots.

Chat bots.

And plenty of them.

Modern bots promise to connect

with us and understand us in more

ways than ever before and that means

they could potentially do more

than just sell us stuff.

For example, they may

even change lives.

Dave Lee has been looking

at a unique project in Seattle

which is using chat bots to help

women working in the sex

industry to stay safe.

This is Aurora Avenue,

north Seattle, a long,

straight road full of liquor stores,

worn out car dealerships,

and cheap motels.

It is known as one of the traps

in the area and that means

it is a popular place where women

would come and be involved in street

prostitution and men come

to basically drive up

and solicit for sex.

As day passes into night,

we see only a handful

of working women walk by.

Just because this street isn't

as busy as it perhaps once

was doesn't mean this business has

gone away and in fact

it is quite the opposite.

The scale of the job to save these

women who are now behind closed

doors is incredibly overwhelming.

Like just about every

business you can think of,

the sex trade is now

almost completely online.

Powered by listings websites

which do little to prevent abuses.

It makes the women caught up in this

dark world much less

visible than ever before.

I was in the life for ten years.

I had a pimp, it was very violent,

I have a quota I had to meet every

day, and if I didn't make the quota,

there were punishments for that.

I stayed sometimes in hotels

for weeks, months at a time,

the same room, not leaving,

maybe just to smoke a cigarette

or go to the vending

machine to get a snack.

Those four walls and I remember

the TV playing just so there

was noise going, right?

I do remember sitting

in there and thinking the whole

world had forgotten about me.

And what would have shifted

if I have looked down on my phone

and someone would have said hey,

this is Jackie from Rest,

I used to be in the life.

I have resources,

do you want to chat?

Real escape from the sex trade,

or Rest, is a group that seeks out

and helps women trapped

in the sex industry.

This is a centre for those

taken out of the life.

It is temporary, safe accommodation.

The organisation is backing

a new initiative developed

with the help of Microsoft that uses

chatbot technology to intercept

anyone considering buying sex.

The team places fake sex

ads on popular sites.

When a potential customer texts

the number seeking to buy,

it is a chatbot that replies.

In this case we have set up

the bot so it is simulating

a 15-year-old trafficking victim.

This is asking me questions like how

old am I, $100 per hour,

what service are you looking for.

We work with survivors

of trafficking to ask them how

a conversation like this would go?

What would you say?

What are the tipoffs that this

would maybe not be a bot but a law

enforcement officer?

It has told you it is 15,

how does that sound?

That's where the hammer drops.

Here's the message.

Wow.

That is a really shocking feeling.

Somebody who thinks

they are anonymous and can go

on the internet and buy another

human being, it is

a big wake-up call.

The bot isn't being

used to arrest people.

Instead it is intended

to work as a deterrent.

Similar artificial intelligence

technology is being used to scrape

websites and reach women who may

be need help.

Outreach comes via a text message,

something that is much easier

to hide from a pimp than talking

to a charity worker in the street.

With text outreach, we can reach

so many more individuals on these

phone numbers that we are pulling

from online ads and when a girl

gets a text message,

she can respond to it in a time

and a place that is

safe for her to do so.

Impressed with what they've seen

so far, law enforcement agencies

in Seattle are now using the tech

with encouraging results.

There are thousands of buyers online

at any time of the day or night.

When we post a fake ad posing

as a person involved in prostitution

we will get 250 responses

in the first two hours

and there is no way that law

enforcement has the capacity

to respond to that.

A chatbot allows us to connect

with and deter all of those

buyers online at any time.

We've never able to do that.

Yet this issue needs a more

permanent solution to stop websites

being used to sell sex.

That is what is being worked

on here at the US Senate.

It is time to say no more.

New anti-sex trafficking measures

have bipartisan support

here but some tech companies have

raised concerns that the new rules

could be too broad.

While tech companies and legislators

iron out the detail,

Amanda's work in saving

women continues daily.

Just yesterday I had a young woman

come up to me who was living

in our residential programme

and she is like, Amanda,

I have a car, I have a licence,

I have insurance.

Like, insurance, legit.

Those are the moments that make it

all worthwhile and less

overwhelming because we know

we are making a difference.

When James Bond used a jet

pack to escape the bad

guys in Thunderball,

the world with jet pack mad.

But the US military designed Bell

rocket belt that he used was later

scrapped due to its high price

and limited flight time.

Almost 60 years on, science fiction

is finally becoming science fact.

Several companies and even

individuals around the world have

taken to the skies in recent years

to show off their

versions of a jetpack.

And recently, I was invited

to strap myself into one.

Fortunately, this was only in VR.

OK, here we go, we are going up.

OK!

The real thing has been built

and tested by New Zealand company

Martin Aircraft which is now

being bought by the Chinese

science company Quang Chi.

Firstly, technically,

it isn't a jet pack.

Its lifts off using two ducted

fans which are powered

by a petrol engine.

It is still in testing but the team

hopes that by the time it is ready,

it will be able to fly as fast as 40

kilometres an hour at

an altitude of 2500 feet.

On a single tank, it should last

for about 30 minutes,

covering distances of 20 kilometres,

carrying about 100 kilos.

And the company says it will be used

for far more than just fulfilling

the dream of human flight.

TRANSLATION:

What can we do

if there are people stranded

in a high-rise fire?

This jet pack can reach places

a helicopter cannot.

A helicopter requires space

but with a jet pack you can get very

near and hose the fire down.

Martin Aircraft has been developing

flight technology for over three

decades and previously thought it

would start selling

these by last year.

Now, the company hopes the Chinese

financial boost will finally be

enough to get it off the ground.

Back at my VR demonstration,

I am starting to realise I may not

be the ideal jet pack pilot.

That is quite enough from us

for this week's Click

but there is plenty more happening

on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for watching

and we will see you soon.