Our very own Robin Blandford featured in National Newspaper the "Sunday Business Post" this week. The article explains what DECISIONS [D4H] is and how we help response teams around the world every day.

Funding from The Arthur Guinness Fund & Enterprise Ireland is applauded again and Robin speaks of what we hope the funding will do for DECISIONS [D4H].

"We will use The Arthur Guinness Funding to develop Decisions for Heroes predictive technology and increase sales overseas. We will be looking at how better to capture and analyse data, improving our statistics and charts and focusing on predictive analysis."

We are delighted for DECISIONS [D4H] to be featured in one of the countries top newspapers.

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When IT expert Robin Blandford established Decisions for Heroes (D4H) in 2008 to develop software for search and rescue teams, he wanted to save lives more than he wanted to make money.

Three years on, Blandford is at the helm of a thriving business with customers in seven countries.

He has four staff at the company’s headquarters in Howth, Co Dublin, and three sales contractors in the US and Canada.

For Blandford, however, the main aim of Decisions for Heroes has not changed since day one, when he decided to combined a background in digital media with his work as a volunteer cliff rescuer.

"I had been volunteering with the Irish Coastguard for seven years at that stage on sea cliff rescues in Howth, where I’m from, and had just returned home after two years in an IT role with Reuters in London," said Blandford.

"Through my own involvement in the Coastguard’s response missions, I felt we could make more use of technology to improve our success rate.

The systems we were using were very manual and everything was done on paper so there was scope there to develop search technology."

Blandford secured funding from Enterprise Ireland to research his idea and the result was a software application that would enable rescue workers to spot trends and patterns in incidents, thereby targeting their missions more effectively.

The chief aim of Decisions For Heroes is to save lives by helping emergency services personnel to make better decisions.

Web-based response

Instead of archiving information as paperwork, the software generates real-time profiles of members, their experience levels and the resources that are available to them.

This data can then be used to deliver relevant data to the front line before and during rescue missions.

"I realised that software for the live operations would not be as effective as an administrative technology that could be used to analyse trends and statistics using historical clusters, patterns and trends," said Blandford.

"Before this software, the most advanced tools used by rescue teams were Access databases and spreadsheets. Decisions for Heroes is web-based, so it allows them to sign in, record incident and training based data, build useful profiles so they can work out when and where specific incidents are about to occur and can plan accordingly.

"In Howth, for example, we found that there was a cluster of incidents on the north-east point of the peninsula.

Further analysis showed that these incidents were primarily suicides and, from there, we were able to ascertain that most related to visitors to the area rather than local people.

"This informed the way we responded.

Had we been dealing with locals, then the response would have been to provide local support through community groups.

"Because the activity related primarily to visitors to the area, we concentrated instead on signage from the Samaritans on pathways leading into the area.

"We also found that 4pm on Sunday afternoons was the most likely time for these incidents to occur, so we moved our patrols to that time."

In Ireland, Decisions for Heroes is used by the Irish Coast Guard, Red Cross, a number of independent life boats and Irish Water Safety, which is using the software to record drownings.

Overseas, Blandford said D4H clients included sheriff departments in the US and Canada, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and other international taskforces involved in large-scale emergency response missions.

"We are about more than profit," he said. "We give an 80 per cent discount to any charity or voluntary organisation that wants to use the technology.

"In Ireland, we would like to get the Red Cross, St John and the Order of Malta, but my vision is ultimately to create a centralised database so we can have other pieces of software building off what we have and enabling us to store and retrieve data across the board."

Funding boost

Earlier this year, Decisions for Heroes secured equity investment of €50,000 for a 10 per cent ordinary equity stake in the firm, under Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund for life science, clean tech and industrial start-ups.

More recently, it got a further €100,000 boost from the 2011 Arthur Guinness Fund, an investment vehicle for social entrepreneurs, which was established in 2009 to mark the brand’s 250th anniversary.

Open to both individuals and organisations, the fund supports the work of projects that can deliver positive and sustainable change in Irish communities.

It has made total funding of €1.65million available to 20 social entrepreneurs over two separate rounds.

Last year, it awarded €100,000 each to ten social enterprise projects.

The second round of funding, announced last month, made €650,000 available to ten further ventures.

The second fund received 450 applicants from social entrepreneurs all over Ireland.

These applicants were assessed by representatives from Diageo, Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and a panel of external judges from the social enterprise and business sectors.

Arthur Guinness winners

In addition to D4H, other winners included Jamie Regan, who established Hand on Heart Enterprises in Dublin to develop a model for supportive enterprise to help people who are blind or have low vision to enter the workforce.

John Evoy set up Irish Men’s Sheds Association to create unique environments around the country where men, particularly those who have been hit by unemployment, can improve their self esteem through education, up-skilling and health promotion.

The brainchild of George Boyle, the Fumbally Exchange is a design hub in Dublin’s Liberties in which entrepreneurs, the unemployed, sole traders and small businesses share ideas and office space.

Michael Hallissy and John Hurley set up H2 Learning and a new virtual learning platform called AdultMaths to help people uncomfortable with the prospect of returning to adult education, to improve their maths skills.

Oisin Scollard’s Turn2Me created an online interactive community of 3,500 people who help and support each other in a peer-to-peer environment. A former prison officer, Stephen Plunkett established UCasadh to help former prisoners to re-enter the workforce.

The programme provides sheltered training and employment to build structure, confidence and self-esteem.

Stuart McLaughlin is behind Fundit, a web platform that allows members of the public to fund ideas they like in return for creative rewards. John Kearney set up West Cork Rapid Response to bring top-class medical services to rural locations, in areas including intensive care drugs, monitoring equipment, diagnostics and skills.

Vivartes was established by Denis Roche as a web platform to relieve the problem of anxiety and depression among patients in care facilities by enabling them to stay connected with their families and friends.

Robin Blandford said he would use the Arthur Guinness funding to develop Decisions for Heroes’ predictive technology and increase sales overseas.

"We’ll be looking at how better to capture and analyse data, improving our statistics and char t s and focusing on predictive analysis," he said.

"We are also planning to broaden our mobile applications and launch a service which will allow rescue teams on site to send real-time images and audio data of a rescue situation back to their command post."