Vital Responder – Monitoring Stress among First Responder Professionals
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Start Date: July 1st, 2009 End Date: December 31st, 2012 PIs: João Paulo Cunha (IEETA/UA), Prya Narasimhan (CMU) Dual Degree Ph.D. Student: Ye Can (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Teams: IT, UP, IEETA/UA, Carnegie Mellon |
The goal of the Vital Responder research project is to explore the synergies between innovative wearable technologies, scattered sensor networks, intelligent building technology and precise localization services to provide secure, reliable and effective first-response systems in critical emergency scenarios. The core problem under consideration is to evaluate human stress in real-time under adverse conditions, by means of continuous online vital sign monitoring of first responders. Turning this vision into engineering reality requires significant advances on the several fronts: (a) real-time information gathering of body signals is very hard to achieve in uncontrolled and dangerous environments, (b) GPS based location systems do not work indoors, and (c) inter-disciplinary research between engineers and clinicians on the origins and nature of physiological stress is still at an infant stage. The “silver bullet” is provided by a high-tech company named Biodevices, which together with researchers at the University of Aveiro developed a suite of non-intrusive wearable technologies, as inconspicuous as a t-shirt, capable of gathering relevant information about the individual.
The next step, which is currently taken in collaboration with researchers at IT, University of Porto and Carnegie Mellon is to view Vital Jackets as nodes of a distributed system that leverages the rich data sets with short-range communication, intelligent building technologies and localization capabilities. Ultimately the team will deploy a prototype infrastructure that enables continuous online monitoring of the collected information. Companies like McLaren Electronics and Petratex are also involved in the project.
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Objectives:
– Develop the Next Generation wearable intelligent garment for vital signs and other body information monitoring.
– Deploy a novel mobile telematic infrastructure to enable the continuous online monitoring .
– Novel ad-hoc sensor network protocols
– New radio-frequency location services (indoor and outdoor)
– Explore post-event analysis for better event detectors
– Explore integration with intelligent building systems to better respond to emergency and critical events
Videos:
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjXlUZVgg9c&feature=related [Vital Responder project, Porto Canal – Porto Alive Mentes que Brilham – January 19, 2012]
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDSrQNrvOLI (Twiter Jacket tests in I.E.E.T.A. Messing arround with technology in Vital Responder Project)
– http://cla.fccn.pt/2009/video.php?id=13208 (Science 2009, João Paulo Cunha talks about the Vital Responder Project – July 29-30, 2009)
