Situational Awareness for Fire Emergencies (SAFE™)

Many firefighters die each year in the line of duty. These fatalities often result from firefighters becoming asphyxiated, lost, or trapped in the burning structures they’re battling to save. On average, a firefighter sending a distress call has less than 10 minutes of oxygen remaining, while the average response time to rescue the distressed firefighter is more than 20 minutes.

Improving the situational awareness of firefighters is a vital step toward reducing the number of firefighter fatalities. To help solve this problem, ITT has developed the Situational Awareness for Fire Emergencies (SAFE™) system.  The SAFE™ system includes 3D personnel locators and a vehicle-mounted Augmented Reality (AR) visualization system. The vehicle-mounted AR system capable of showing the locations of firefighters operating inside a building superimposed directly on a live video image of the building exterior, which is captured by a camera mounted on the vehicle roof. The main features of this system are:

·         Data about sensors and firefighters are directly mapped to the locations of these entities

·         Enhanced situational awareness – reduced cognitive load for the incident commander

·         No need for 2D or 3D map — live video always available

·         Inertial Motion Unit (IMU) combined with RF mesh network triangulation provides 3 meter accuracy indoors

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