FIRE
Background
The Fire Information and Rescue Equipment project was started by Russell Romero and Myself in the spring of 2002. The project grew out of a class project exploring the use of (then) novel computers called motes which combined low power microntrollers with digital radios.
These motes had the capability of speaking to each other and conventional computers, forming a true mesh network. The FIRE project grew from a simple case study to a full fledged research project eventually supporting two MS students and one PhD student.
System Overview
The FIRE system consisted of three overarching elements
- FireEye: A head mounted display unobtrusively integrated into a standard SCBA mask. FireEye was the topic of Joel Wilson’s PhD.
- eICS: The electronic Incident Command System
- SmokeNet: a pervasive computer network which ties the FireEye and eICS components to building health, firefighter status, and an evacutation routing system.
The majority of this work occurred between 2003 and 2006, and consisted of class projects, research grants, undergraduate summer projects. We met regularly with firefighters from the Bay Area as well as the Chicago Fire Department to discuss our progress and get feedback.
Fire Eye
The FireEye concept explored methods for providing firefighter with greater awareness of their surrounding without cumbersome interface or technology that might interfere with their tried and true techniques for search and rescue. A low power wearable computer mated with Telos motes and various head mounted displays was the protoyping package. Overall, we found that a nose-down view provided firefighters with the optimum balance between information readiness and distraction minimization. Joel found that overall firefighters prefer a an egocentric map display, but a considerable minority would rather a geocentric map display. Joel led this effort, and Russell Romero, Jess Reynolds and myself contributed. Below are a series of FireEye prototypes.
elCS (electronic Incident Command System)
The eICS was an electronic implementation of the NFPA Incident Command System, designed to help the incident commander (IC) orchestrate the scene and assess situations with greater efficiency, more information, and higher certainty. Lloyd Lim created a Flash GUI prototype that showed important information desired by the IC such as resource allocation, location of personnel on the floor plans of the building, and biometric data of firefighters including air supply and heart rate, information fed back through SmokeNet. A working prototype was created in Java to better interface with SmokeNet. This work was done by Lloyd Lim and myself. Below is Lloyd Lim’s Flash GUI Prototype.
SmokeNet
SmokeNet consisted of pervasive wireless computers placed in
- Smoke detectors
- Guidance Beacon
- Firefighters turnout gear
The smoke detectors and guidance beacons interacted to determine the location of danger and route firefighters to the flash point while routing victims to safety. These nodes were fixed, and provided secondary functionality as an indoor local positioning system for the firefighters as well as a tracking network. Andrew Redfern and myself led this effort, with considerable help from Vikas Bhargava, Phil Levis and his CS 198 class, and Colin Patton.
