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Worcester Polytechnic Instiitute reports it has landed $1 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to continue developing a system to track firefighters’ locations, monitor their vital signs and measure the temperature at the scene of a fire.
The system is intended to warn commanders when firefighters are at risk of stress-related heart attacks and to provide warning of a flashover, the sudden ignition of combustible materials in an enclosed space where fire breaks out.
WPI’s Precision Personnel Location research team will collaborate with the school’s Fire Protection Engineering Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Foster Miller to develop a wireless sensor array called the Fireground Environment Sensor Monitoring (ESM) System, which is intended to be inexpensive, portable and disposable. The system would be carried into a building and placed in selected rooms by firefighters. Once in place, the device would deploy a heat sensor-studded mast that would rise to the ceiling.
Physiological monitoring is provided by a WPI-developed wireless pulse oximeter worn on the forehead and a sensor-embedded T-shirt made by Foster-Miller.
WPI began work on the location aspects of the system in 1999 after the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse fire that killed six Worcester firefighters who were trapped in the smoke-filled, windowless building. Since then, the school’s Precision Personnel Location research group has received about $4 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army and FEMA. The system combines RFID and radar technologies to locate firefighters to within a few feet in three dimensions. The firefighter’s location, movement and physiological information are displayed on a screen at an incident’s commander’s station.
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