Jul 19 2007
Regina Hunter, retired Sandia National Laboratories employee, is launching a new software product, Safe at Home™, based on Sandia-developed RAMPART™. Safe at Home allows homeowners to assess risks arising from accidents, fire, crime inside or outside the house, hurricane, flood, earthquakes, tornados and winter storms. The software analyzes the risks of death, injury, property and content loss, loss of use of the home, and first-responder delays.
“Safe at Home does not require the user to have any expertise in risk analysis,” Hunter says. “It asks about 200 questions and takes about half an hour to get results. Users can change their answers and get revised results in real time, allowing them to determine what changes might lessen their risks.”
Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.
Hunter led the development of the parent software, RAMPART, while still working at Sandia. RAMPART software is the first risk-based approach to building management. It is used by the General Services Administration (GSA) to assess the risks of terrorism, natural disasters and crime to the nearly 8,000 federal buildings it manages nationwide.
Hunter is president of Ducks in a Row, Inc., the company launching the new Safe at Home software. Ducks, which has been part of the Sandia RAMPART team since 2004, helped develop version 3.0 of RAMPART and is currently working on version 4.0, together with Susan Carson (6766), the Sandia principal investigator, and Robert Browitt of Architrave Software, Inc. Sandia awarded a licensing agreement to Ducks in a Row when Regina retired three years ago. She has been developing Safe at Home ever since.
Hunter says that in developing Safe at Home, Ducks has improved the databases used in the original RAMPART software in several ways.
“For example, Ducks has invested in substantial upgrades to data used in weighting the various hazards,” Hunter says. “The new data allow the consequences of all the hazards to be put onto the same scale. Crime data have also been updated.”
These improved data will probably also be used in the next version of RAMPART. Using proprietary graphics software, Ducks has also created a new and more intuitive presentation of the risk assessment results and substantially improved the appearance of natural hazard maps included in both RAMPART and Safe at Home. Ducks is providing the graphics software to Architrave for RAMPART version 4.0 development at no charge as part of the team effort.
Safe at Home is part of the Home Safe™ line of software developed at Ducks in a Row, Inc. Home Safe is designed to help homeowners manage their risk by providing easy-to-use software that incorporates the fundamental principles of risk analysis without requiring them to learn anything about risk analysis.
Keep it Safe lets homeowners inventory their homes, offices or collections quickly, to produce a detailed list of valuables for insurers, protecting the financial consequences of the risks analyzed by Safe at Home.
Safe and Sound™, due out early next year, will help homeowners manage their health and safety risks.
“We ask people ‘What have you got to lose?’” Hunter says. “Usually they don’t know. They have little knowledge of the relative probabilities or consequences of manmade or natural hazards, so they tend to worry about the wrong things and invest inappropriately in home safety.”