Modern Mobile Emergency Applications: Fact or Fiction?

In this paper we explore how mobile emergency applications compare to existing means of reaching emergency services, and outline some important problems blocking their more widespread adoption. Many problems, such as roaming and standardized data exchange between the citizen and the public safety answering point (PSAP) were recently addressed in the Pan-European Mobile Emergency Application (PEMEA) standard; some remain strictly in the domain of the vendors, for example, deep integration with the mobile operating systems. However, a broader set of problems relates to communication and mobile networks: the way such calls are charged, prioritized, and integrated with the back-office systems of the telecom providers. We explore how some of these challenges could be addressed in 5G networks with their strong focus on softwarization, virtualization, network slicing and mobile edge computing. Finally, we also address several business-related challenges, such as user awareness, application discoverability and usability, and present our attempt at addressing low user awareness in critical situations.