Smart textile-based protective system for firefighters

This paper presents a research focused on a smart textile-based protective system which is intended to bring more safety to firefighters facing hazardous conditions. The system is fully integrated into a firefighter protective suit and it is able to monitor heart rate (HR), to detect movements of a firefighter, to detect toxic and combustible gases in the environment and to measure temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH) inside and outside of the suit. The protective system consists of developed integrated sensor modules, e-textile wiring harnesses, body control unit (BCU), central processing unit (CPU), body area network (BAN) and wide area network (WAN). The measured data are wirelessly transmitted over a wide area network with automatic routing algorithm to the central processing unit, which is checked by a firefighter operation chief, who is kept informed about an actual state of individual fire fighters. In case that some monitored parameter oversteps pre-set threshold values the BCU will automatically inform a fire fighter by means of acoustic alarm about oncoming risk.