Using Your Android Phone as a SAR Pager

One of the great things about pagers is their optimization for doing a single thing. They sit there silent until they are called upon to roust us out of whatever we are doing. Contrast this with your smartphone. A device that is used to check email, make phone calls, surf the web, and play games. It is the antithesis of your trusty pager. With all of its fancy features, most smartphones are not well-adapted to making sure that they make enough noise to wake up up in the middle of the night, or alert you if you happen to miss the anemic tone they emit. To press them into pager duty, we will have to download additional help. A non-smart (dumb?) phone can also receive the messages mentioned here, but applications cannot be installed on these sorts of phones.

First, the ideas presented here require that your team use some sort of text message callout system. Such a system sends everybody a text message with a common text string. [By the way, ALL county teams have access to this functionality. It has been used in the county for 10 years, and you can read about it here.  Contact Jeff Lehman for info]. For example, on my team all callout messages have the string, "[Callout]" in the subject. This is automatically placed there by the mail list that is used to distribute the text messages. Having this string enables you to set up your phone so that only messages with "[Callout]" in them make your phone ring at all hours of the night. This keeps you from being shaken awake by an SMS (text) spam message in the middle of the night.

In the Android Market there are two applications that I have used successfully to "pager-ize" my smartphone: FireAlert and Klaxon Oncall Pager. Both of these can be set to look for a particular text string, or sender address/phone, and fire off an alert tone. I recommend using a text string to trigger an alert since it is not specific to a particular person. If your team is like my team, then the same person may not call the team each time. By using a text string in conjunction with the messaging list, regardless of who sends the message, as long as it goes to the list, it will have the proper identifier and will cause your phone to make noise.

You may say that your phone already makes noise when somebody sends a text message. Why would you need one of these apps? The answer is, would the sound that your phone makes when it receives a text message wake you up in the middle of the night? Probably not, since most phones will only alert you once, and they can be rather quiet. Could you sleep through a ringer that sounds continuously for 3 minutes, or periodically repeats a notification sound indefinitely? Probably not. That's what these tools do. You can force them to make noise even if your phone is set to "silent". They can also be set to repeat the notification over and over until it is recognized. This is the true utility of these applications.

One feature of FireAlert is that it can be set up with more than one trigger. This is useful if you serve on more than one team, or you are want certain ring tones for certain types of messages [ed. note The current version of Klaxon now allows this]. It will also show a screen pop-up when the message is received. There are a number of options for FireAlert such as setting the length of time that the notification will sound. You can have it sound continuously for anywhere from one second to endlessly. Can you sleep though an endless ring?

There are a number of options in Klaxon as well. For example, Klaxon allows you to use the alarm volume which allows for the phone to make noise even if it is set to silent. This is handy if you are forgetful, like me, and forget to change the ringer on your phone at night. Klaxon also has a "quick reply" feature where you can pre-program replies to your messages. With a single button press, you can respond with your availability to a search. Klaxon has additional features for improving responses through Verizon's network, as well as working with other notification apps on your phone. One disadvantage of Klaxon is that it doesn't have a home-screen widget that allows for quick disabling/enabling. 

Either of these apps are useful to the Android SAR user, and should be considered if you are having trouble hearing your phone at night. If you have any questions about their use, or you would like to set up a callout system for your team, please contact me via my sbsar.org address.

Update on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 12:34 by Jeff Lehman

As mentioned in the Android Market by the developer, Klaxxon does not play well with MMS. I have found this to be true, and it seems that it does not reliably catch MMS messages which are sent via the SMS-Email gateways that are operated by all of the cell service providers.

Comments

[Dave @ polycom ip 550]

I like the application, but I'm not seeing it as a replacement for a real pager. It needs more features and settings. polycom ip 550