Development of a real-time supported system for firefighters in emergency cases

Abstract

The firefighters can be injured by unintentional falls during the implementation tasks because of the broken in floors, structure elements; gas bombs; liquid boil ejection and toxic gases … in the fire. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a portable and efficient device to monitor the falls by integrating a micro controller, a 3-DOF (Degrees of Freedom) accelerometer sensor, a MQ7 sensor (Semiconductor Sensor for Carbon Monoxide), a GSM/GPRS (Group Special Mobile/General packet radio service) modem, and the corresponding embedded fall detection algorithms. By developing algorithms and the corresponding simulations to monitor the fall event which can distinguish between being fall and the other daily activities (ADLs) such as standing, walking, running, sitting, lying. The signals from accelerometer are sent to the micro controller to monitor and alert the fall events. The cascade posture recognition is proposed to enhance the fall detection accuracy by determining if the posture is a result of a fall. Furthermore, MQ7 sensor is integrated into the proposed system to confirm the fall directly in emergency situations when air supporting device is working in failure. Based on the detection results, if a person falls with faint, an alert message will be sent to their leader via the GSM/GPRS modem. We had carefully investigated the threshold values (to determine the fall events) and the window size (to determine the time frame for analyzing) by MATLAB. After that, we selected the most suitable values for these parameters to achieve the optimal performance when it is working in emergency places.