A wearable system for firefighters smoke exposure monitoring

Abstract

Firefighters (FF) have to deal in their routine with dangerous situations, exposing themselves to extreme environmental conditions, which can put their lives at risk. Extreme heat exposure, smoke inhalation and reduced visibility are among the most significant hazards to firefighters involved in the suppression of forest fires. In this sense, some new technologies were built addressing the monitoring of firefighters health in the field, mainly sport-oriented solutions adapted for both scientific studies and commercial solutions. However, none of those aim at the mitigation of the main reason for incidents involving firefighters: the exposure to dangerous concentrations of air pollutants. Our purpose is the development of an integrated hardware and software solution that allows the online monitoring of vital and environmental parameters, helping the FF to preserve their personal health and safety. The system is composed of a specific hardware device attached to the helmet that measures several parameters of interest (e.g. elevation, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, luminosity, exposure to carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide), and a mobile application running in a smartphone, which processes information gathered by the helmet hardware to determine if the firefighter is at an acceptable level of exposure/danger and triggers an alarm, if necessary. From an operational point of view, this work proposes a cost-effective solution to monitor FF smoke exposure in typical adverse scenarios such as forest fires, allowing the detection and mitigation of hypothetical intoxication incidents. The hardware component is easily integrated in standard firefighter’s protection equipment and the mobile application can run in any "off-the-shelf" mobile computing device. Beyond the stand-alone firefighters monitoring perspective, this wearable technological solution opens several opportunities as a data source. In this sense, under development is the integration of the near real-time observations into a Decision Support System (DSS) aiming to provide knowledge-based aid to firefighters at critical decision-making situations, thus helping with the safe and successful management of fire fighting.