Pandemics. Wildfires. Riots.
Those are just three of the countless emergencies people have had to deal with over the past year.
An often-overlooked aspect of any emergency is keeping in contact with those effected by an emergency, whether it’s sending a mass broadcast during a hurricane, communicating campus lockdowns, or simply keeping parents informed that their children’s school bus is running late.
That’s where Titan Health & Security Technologies (HST) comes in.
This emergency communication security platform was created by Newport Coast resident Vic Merjanian in 2013 after a visit to his alma mater, Corona del Mar High School. After observing the school’s security and thinking about potential school incidents, Merjanian was set on creating a way to empower students, staff, teachers, police and parents in the event of potential school emergencies.
Titan HST was created to provide immediately accessible, organizationally, and technologically structured comprehensive 2-way emergency communication, while reducing anxiety and response time.
According to Titan HST, the company’s app has had more than 200 million uses during the last year, with an average response time of 1.2 seconds and 99.999 percent reliability. Titan HST allows businesses to stay connected with employees and customers in times of crisis, including preventing the spread of COVID-19 by providing health pre-screenings allowing users to report COVID-19 status & symptoms.
Merjanian added multiple abilities to the Titan HST app in response to the pandemic, including contact tracing via phones that are in close proximity to each other or contact tracing when an infected individual is in an area and another individual later enters the same area/zone. The app can also run reports and notify potentially exposed individuals, and create custom polling and surveys of employees and guests.
Population Density Monitoring is another feature of the Titan HST. Users can receive automatic notifications when pre‑set population densities are exceeded to maintain social distancing, and the app can monitor the presence and duration of sanitization units at a specific location or run reports to verify that all areas have been properly sanitized.
Titan HST works with hospitals and health providers to help them be more effective and provide help remotely if possible. Large organizations and campuses pay a multi-user fee, and the service is offered for free to students.
Hundreds of sites in the United States are using Titan HST, including Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, which began using Titan HST in the summer of 2019, but recently started implementing the COVID-19 platform.
Titan HST allows Vanguard University to pre-screen all students currently living on campus during the pandemic for symptoms, instantly identify and notify anyone exposed to an infected individual and implement density monitoring to set maximum occupancy levels by area. Titan then generates reporting to verify that all areas have been properly sanitized. If there is a confirmed case on campus, Titan HST allows the University to track the precise location of the infected individual and quickly implement quarantine and risk mitigation procedures.
Vanguard University has also been leveraging Titan HST as a texting app to deliver food to students in quarantine on campus, making two-way communication with students easier than ever.
“Titan HST has been a critical app for our campus that allows us to streamline important and urgent information to students and staff in the event of an emergency,” said Kent Ferrin, director of Campus Safety, Vanguard University. “We were previously using a system that was not interactive, whereas Titan HST enables communication between students in need and Campus Safety for immediate response. Having Titan HST in place and being prepared for any scenario gives us a sense of calm.”
Vanguard University staff and students have also utilized Titan HST for stranger alerts or notifications regarding suspicious person(s) on campus, as well as flood and earthquake warnings and other safety issues.
The Parks, Beaches and Recreation Department of the city of Newport Beach also uses Titan HST.
“Last summer was our fourth year using Titan HST,” said Brason Alexander, the recreation supervisor for the City of Newport Beach. “In this day and age, with all of the events going on, we use it as a targeted communication system for the people in our program. Our summer day camp has 110 kids and we take field trips. If we have any kind of emergency, instead of calling 100 parents, we can shoot a message to their phone via text or email telling parents everyone is fine, we had an issue with the bus.”
Alexander noted that parents don’t even need to download the Titan app.
“If we have their email and phone number, we can still get the message out,” he said. “It’s really efficient, and the partnership has bene fantastic. Titan is super responsive. We use it for peace of mind.”
And peace of mind is just one attribute that Titan HST offers. The company has been granted a dozen patents and has spent a lot of time on Research and Development of augmented reality and mesh networking.
“The augmented reality lets you see through walls, smoke and crowds, so you can find people in zero visibility situations,” explained Merjanian. “The mesh networking lets our emergency communications continue to operate whether you are a school or a stadium, or anything in between. Even when cell networks or WiFi are down or overloaded or out of range, we still work. If you have a public service power outage, we still work.”
With the ability to do everything from send mass broadcast messages, photos, documents and videos to users to notifying users of lockdowns and safety status, it’s no wonder Titan HST is expanding both overseas and in the U.S. In fact, Merjanian – an attorney and the founder and managing partner of Kalfayan Merjanian LLP’s Newport Beach office – is now spending more time with Titan than trials, but he’s happy knowing that Titan HST is providing peace of mind for millions of people.
For more information, visit https://www.titanhst.com.
