Wearable technology is making itself known across the fire service, helping enhance firefighter safety, improving operational efficiency, and offering real-time health monitoring.
The types of wearables available to fire departments can monitor an array of firefighter biometrics and provide location tracking with data going to an incident commander’s (IC’s) phone, tablet, or laptop.
Paul Couston, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ascent Integrated Tech, says his company’s ShieldPortal™, ShieldModule™, and BioCom™ modules, part of its Shield platform, allow the platform to track firefighters on a fire scene and in a multiple-story building along the X, Y, and Z axes as well as providing firefighter biometric data in real time for ICs.
Couston points out that the Shield platform’s mapping function gives simultaneous localization in real time, using 12 points of data in mapping the environment, including GPS, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), accelerometers, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and pressure sensors, while the BioCom module provides health and environmental alerts to the IC, including each firefighter’s heart rate, body temperature, and any hazardous gases present.
He says that after Ascent conducted trials with several fire departments during the past year, it is now focusing its research and development on its WearTAK wearable app module and a wearable like a smartwatch instead of a previous end-user device that’s about the size of a cell phone and goes in a firefighter’s turnout pocket. “We’ve found that the Samsung watch is the most relevant from a public safety perspective,” Couston explains, “because it’s cost effective and its geo stacks (linked data for geographic relevance) and physiological data are great.”
Another benefit of the Samsung watch, he notes, is that it allows Ascent to get away from one-to-one pairing of devices and launch the units on an enterprise level. “For example, four units can be deployed on the four firefighters on an engine, and a battalion chief or incident commander might see that the firefighter in seat two has been having an extremely high heart rate, which might call for some type of intervention,” he says, “while also monitoring firefighters in other seats.”
The smartwatches that use the Ascent app transmit their data to a Team Awareness Kit (TAK) network, like a network originally developed for the United States military, Couston points out. “The data streams firefighter latitude, longitude, heart rate, oxygen saturation, temperature, exertion, and other information and will alert for either high or low heart rate and also for a Mayday.” He notes the current models get about 14 hours of continuous use before needing a charge. It takes about an hour to get to a full charge.
Dale Rolfson, battalion chief and chief technology officer for the Indianapolis (IN) Fire Department (IFD), says that while partnered with Indiana University’s RedLab, the IFD was part of the First Responder Smart Tracking (FRST) challenge to locate first responders in the X, Y, and Z axes, using Ascent Integrated Tech’s wearable devices and many competing devices. “Ascent transitions from a phone device to a wearable on the wrist and built in the ability to track biometrics,” Rolfson says. “We are currently testing eight Android-based cell phones and 10 Ascent biometric watches that all have plug-ins for civTAK and have been doing research on tracking for two years and biometrics for one year.”
Rolfson notes the department created digital models of its headquarters station, Station 7, and the training academy tower and burn building to use as a test bed. “We’ve used the technology mostly for location tracking at large-scale events,” he says, “which allows us to locate resources and direct the closest unit to any type of incident. On the biometrics, we started with tracking heart rate. But, with the new software w