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ICE4SAFETY in cooperation with the United Nations Agency - International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
tasked with promulgating standards for the telecommunications industries is announcing the new standard referenced as E.123.
This new initiative by the ITU is meant to address the need for a non language based ICE standard for use
in telecommunications instruments such as phones, PDA's etc for countries that are not familiar with the latin based
language.
ICE4SAFETY has modified the current design to incorporate reference to the new standard
such that it can be easily recognized both domestically (North America) and Internationally to represent the location
of emergency information in electronic telecommunication devices.
The use of this symbol will allow for the
seamless introduction of the standard without undue confusion or delay.
The objective of the standard is
to replace language based reference to emergency contact info in phones with numerical references such as 01, 02, 03 up to
and including 09.
ICE4SAFETY has tested this method and find that it in fact works to the degree that phones programmed
in this manner will list primary contacts in numerical order. On phones that are graphic symbol based (such as I-Phones®),
they will benefit by the incorporation and use of the new ICE.123™
Image to alert emergency responders to the availability of critical information.
An
excerpt from the ITU announcement below:
ITU believes that international standards must
be usable by anyone, regardless of language or script, and has thus taken one step further by approving the standardized language-independent
version of ICE using Arabic numerals (the digits 0 through 9) instead, since they are known by all users around the world.
The new clause in Recommendation E.123 proposes to store emergency contact numbers in the form "0nx",
where "n" is a digit from 01 through 09 and "x" is any meaningful descriptive character string in any
language or script (e.g. "Anna" or "Spouse"). In the handset's directory this would be displayed as
"01Anna" or "01Spouse" enabling easy identification by the emergency services.
ICE4SAFETY
Highly Recommends that if you use this E.123 Methodology that you avoid using folders to store contact
info and instead use 01Emergency, 02HealthProxy, 03Spouse, 04Translator in your native language or the host
country language.
Foldering, while a convenient phone option, can become an impediment to
someone not familiar with your phone who is attempting to retrieve emergency information about/for you. Also, in the
event of a phone battery or system failure, phones using SIM Cards to store emergency contact data can have the cards removed
and read by other phones using this technology. That is more likely to happen than a battery or charger being located
to power up the phone. Depending on the phone features, they may not have the capability to discern content in folders
- so leave the contact info out of folders.
Another good reason to be prepared
and carry one or more ICE Cards!
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