The closing session of the VR2Market Project took place at INESC TEC on June 26th, 2019 with the PIs of the project João Paulo Cunha, in Portugal, and Bob Iannuci, that participated remotely from CMU. The session was opened by João Claro, INESC TEC’s Chief Executive Officer and former CMU Portugal National Director (2013-2017).
The CMU Portugal Program project VR2 Market was launched in 2013 through a Call for Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives (ERIs) financed by FCT and was developed in partnership with Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering (INESC TEC), the Institute of Telecommunications (IT), the Institute of Electronic and Telematic Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA), the Portuguese company Biodevices and the Institute of Robotics of Carnegie Mellon University (USA). During the session, each partner presented the results obtained under the research project and the event counted on a special keynote given by Bob Iannucci of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who presented, from California, the results of the collaboration.
The main goal of the project was to provide secure, reliable and effective technologies for first responder professionals in critical emergency scenarios through the development of three main technologies:
- Wearable sensors;
- an IoT based platform for monitoring the exposure to dangerous levels of different agents and peaks of physiological stress of first responders’ teams 3;
- an analysis engine of biomedical and environmental data that is capable of detecting different hazardous states for these professionals.
Duarte Dias, one of the project´s researchers at INESC TEC’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER), explained that “with these technologies, we can better protect our first responders but can also be customized to other risk professionals and even to new scenarios. The technologies have already been tested in extreme environments, with firefighters, for example. So far, professionals only used carbon monoxide sensors in this type of situation, and when these devices were available”.
These technologies will be included in the products of a new spin-off company known as WeSENSS, aiming at developing new wearable devices applied to several types of professionals and scenarios. “At the moment, we are incorporating our sensing technologies of the professionals into the UNO platform, which belongs to the EQS group which, among other services, monitors the industrial facilities in the oil field”, explains Duarte Dias.
For more information about the Project and new developments please visit: http://vitalresponder.inesctec.pt/index.php/project/
