Protecting firefighters with wearable devices

Abstract

Emergency units typically operate under extremely harsh conditions and could benefit from new technologies to perform at their highest potential and provide and ideal test case to push wereable computing to its limits. In this paper we present our work on smart textiles and wearable devices for firefighters. The objective of our work is to create an smart t-shirt capable of measuring the rate and thermal stress state which the user is subject to. For that, several sensors monitor different parameters and send the information, via bluetooth low energy wireless protocol, to a mobile phone and a wrist-watch both with bluetooth low energy communication capabilities. In this paper we explain the main features of our work and show some test accomplished with different levels of temperature to test the robustness of the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.