When a housekeeper or teacher presses a duress button upstairs, responders get a street address and start searching. StoreyIQ adds the floor. It reads the barometer in the staff phone, corrects for the weather and matches the height to your building's floors.
Probable floor
5
Height above ground, last 18 minutes
A real recording, replayed. A phone carried from floor 2 to floor 5 of a university building in Tampere, Finland, followed by a duress button press on floor 5.
The gap
Wireless 911 location was built for streets. Federal rules ask carriers for a height estimate, and send a floor number only "where available." In a six-story hotel or a three-story school, responders still have to search floor by floor.
How it works
The staff app, or your alarm vendor's app, includes a few seconds of air pressure readings with each alert. We use the barometer already inside the phone, so there is no new hardware to install.
Outdoor pressure drifts through the day. We compare each reading with nearby weather station data so that a passing storm does not look like a change of floor.
Each building gets a floor model with its entrance level and the height of every floor. One walk-through calibrates it. Phones check in at the entrance so we know where they started.
The alert carries the probable floor, how likely it is and a 90% range of floors. It goes out as a standard 911 location record (PIDF-LO) or as JSON for your security platform.
What the security desk sees
Probable floor
The desk sees a single floor and the probability behind it. Nobody has to read a height in meters and do the math.
90% range
If someone is on a staircase, the alert says "floor 3 or 4" so responders know to check both.
Standard output
The floor goes into a PIDF-LO location record, the format used by Next Generation 911. Alarm and badge platforms can take the same data as JSON.
Height history
A short height trace shows whether the person was still moving when they pressed the button, and in which direction.
Early results
Researchers carried smartphones through a four-story university building in Tampere, Finland and a three-story museum in Nuremberg, Germany, and logged the true floor along the way. We replayed those recordings through StoreyIQ and scored every estimate against it.
100%
Correct floor in both buildings after calibration, with phones checked in at the entrance. 744 test points.
89%
Correct floor in Nuremberg from a cold start, with no entrance check-in. Every miss was one floor off.
42%
Correct floor in Tampere from a cold start. One phone sent implausible pressure and was rejected. The other was right 88.6% of the time.
Who it's for
Hotels
WAC 296-137-050 requires panic buttons that identify an isolated worker's specific location. In a multi-story hotel, the floor is part of that location.
Schools
Thirteen states require silent panic alarms in public schools. StoreyIQ adds the floor to the alert your district already sends.
Hospitals and clinics
Nurses and front desk staff press a duress button on a ward or clinic floor. Security gets the floor along with the building.
Offices and campuses
Kari's Law and RAY BAUM'S Act require business phone systems to send a dispatchable location with 911 calls, which can include the floor.
StoreyIQ supplies location data to your safety program. It is not a certified life-safety system, and using it does not by itself make a building compliant with any law.
Pilot program
A pilot covers one building and a few staff devices. It stays separate from your live 911 and alarm systems unless you decide to connect it.