High-tech centre to help improve work of Home Team officers

SINGAPORE — The Ministry of Home Affairs is studying the physical and mental needs of its Home Team officers in their work environments, so that it can design equipment and systems to ensure that they perform at their best, by managing fatigue and having customised uniforms, for example.

These are just some of the areas being studied at the ministry’s new high-tech test facility, the Human Performance Centre, which also focuses on developing analytics for surveillance, such as algorithms in closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras to detect and flag suspicious behaviour and activities.

The centre houses a virtual-reality technology suite as well to develop simulated training scenarios.

Spanning 180sqm — or the size of two four-room public housing homes — the facility was launched on Monday (Oct 17) by Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam.

“In the face of declining manpower and increasing demands, technology becomes vital,” he said. “This centre focuses on the most central element in Home Team — our Home Team officers. What it does is analyse how they perform their duties, the equipment they have, the uniform they wear, (and) the kind of situation they’ll be in.”

Dr Naresh Kumar, director of the ministry’s Office of the Chief Science and Technology Officer and Human Factors, said that it is timely to set up such a centre and it has “never been done in this systematic way before”, referring to the emphasis placed on officers’ concerns.

For instance, they will look at customising uniforms to ensure greater mobility for Home Team officers and quicker ways for them to withdraw a gun from a holster during operations. The unlatching of an officer’s holster, say, could trigger an automated alert on the command centre’s dashboard, without requiring the officer to report the action to the centre.

“Whatever a person carries physically must not be such that it encumbers him and leads him to fatigue, error or failure,” Dr Kumar said.

The facility will also look at using virtual reality to enhance training, by having an officer “dexterously control” an unmanned system in a virtual environment, for instance.

On improving surveillance, one example would be to develop analytics for CCTV cameras to locate an abandoned bag, based on details such as its colour or logo. The technology could even trace the owner of the bag and the time it was abandoned.

Information flowing back to command centres could also be compiled and displayed in more “digestible” formats on dashboards to aid situational awareness.

Dr Kumar said: “Normally, you buy things off the shelf (such as software and equipment), you hope that the vendor has taken care of all these things. And they do to some extent, but they also don’t in many ways. Here, we ensure that regardless of what you buy, (the officers’ and operators’ needs) are incorporated.”