With increasing emphasis on getting emergency messages out to identified populations as well as allowing people to call for help more quickly and easily, the emergency telephone has suddenly taken on the profile of the burst of features in personalized cell phones.

   
Emergency telephones at colleges, universities, hospitals and airports, for example, have for a long time allowed people to press a button to call for help. Emerging tech updates now include integration to security video, so cameras can instantly turn to the phone to capture images; running the phones on the IP backbone or wirelessly; hooking up the phones to solar panels for standalone power; and equipping the phones so they can also broadcast mass notification messages throughout a campus or to a specific geographic area.