Fayetteville State University Second UNC Institution to Deploy Rave Guardian "Personal Mobile Alarm System" to Enhance Campus Safety
Fayetteville State University is the second UNC institution to launch Rave Guardian, a Rave Wireless mobile safety tool that transforms cell phones into location-aware lifelines that instantly connect users with campus police. Rave Guardian recently was chosen for the 2009 E-Tech Award for Innovation in Public Safety.
Fayetteville, NC and Framingham, MA (PRWEB) April 20, 2009
Fayetteville State University, a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina, and Rave Wireless, Inc., the leading provider of safety applications for mobile users, today announced that FSU is launching Rave Guardian to increase campus safety for its students, faculty and staff. The mobile phone-activated personal safety tool allows students to proactively connect with and be monitored for safety by campus police. Rave Guardian is the next generation in mobile phone safety designed to prevent incidents from occurring. It complements FSU's Rave Alert system, deployed in 2007, which enables the University to react to and manage a situation by quickly sending emergency text alerts to the entire campus or specific groups in response to an incident.
FSU students and other members of the campus community are able to sign-up for Rave Guardian through a quick online process that registers their phone number along with a personal photo, physical description, pertinent health information, emergency contacts and more. When a student activates Guardian, this information is automatically provided to campus police, along with best available location data.
"Campus safety is an ongoing issue on college campuses across the country, and here at Fayetteville, we are incorporating breakthrough technology because we feel it's important to take every possible measure to keep our students safe," says Travis Bryant, chief of police, Fayetteville State University. "Having a student's complete profile and additional recorded information provides us with an enhanced 911 service that improves our ability to respond to incidents, saving valuable time, and if a major incident occurs, saving lives."
Rave Guardian is a fully hosted system that is easily deployed without any hardware or software to install. The system works on any cell phone from any provider in the U. S. and can be used with any emergency notification system. Universities that use both Rave Alert and Rave Guardian, as is the case at FSU, realize the added convenience of accessing both emergency applications from a single administrative console that taps into the same unified student database.
Guardian can be used in "passive" mode when a user activates the Guardian timer programmed into their cell phone to indicate that campus police should monitor the individual's safe arrival at their destination. Alternatively, it can be used in "active mode" through a pre-programmed Guardian panic button that instantly informs campus police that the individual is threatened or is having a medical crisis.
"Rave Guardian not only gives students like myself peace-of-mind when traveling on or off campus, it also offers huge peace-of-mind to our parents who tend to be nervous now that we've left our homes for the first time in our lives to live in a campus environment," says Lakeitha Greene, a student at Fayetteville State University. "Guardian provides us with a trustworthy, easy to use option to protect ourselves when walking back the dorm in the dark and/or going into town for the night. And because the system is accessed through the cell phone I carry all of the time, it's always available to me and I do not have to remember to carry another device, arrange a campus escort, or simply hope there's a campus bluelight within reach when needed."
"Traditional campus security methods such as bluelights are costly to install and maintain whereby Rave Guardian takes advantage of the cell phones already in students' pockets and the mobile network already installed by carriers," says Raju Rishi, chief strategy officer and co-founder, Rave Wireless, Inc. "Further, Rave Guardian is quick and easy to install, extremely easy to use, and doesn't increase the workload of the police department. If anything, it reduces the workload as a result of the greater detail of information it provides to police, enabling them to respond more efficiently and better to incidents."
Rave Wireless is a market leader in providing mobile safety applications to higher education institutions, with a long list of college and university clients nationwide including numerous UNC schools such as Chapel Hill and FSU, and other North Carolina campuses such as Duke University and Peace College.
FSU students, faculty and staff are encouraged to register for Rave Guardian by logging onto https://www. getrave. com/login/uncfsu (https://www. getrave. com/login/uncfsu)
About Fayetteville State University
FSU is the second-oldest public institution in North Carolina. A member of the University of North Carolina System, FSU has more than 6,300 students and offers degrees in 70 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Dr. James A. Anderson was installed April 3, 2009 as the 11th chief executive officer.
About Rave Wireless
Rave Wireless is the leading provider of mobile safety solutions for higher education institutions, government and enterprises. Rave builds, sells and supports an award-winning suite of safety applications including emergency notification systems and location-aware, personal safety tools such as Rave Alert, Rave Guardian and Rave Transit. More than 100 colleges and universities nationwide rely on Rave Wireless, including Montclair State University (NJ) who has won the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award and the Campus Technology Innovators Award for its implementation of Rave. Rave Wireless is headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Sigma Partners, and RRE Ventures.
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