Development of a wearable system for monitoring the firefighter's physiological state

This paper proposes a new wearable system for firefighter protection. This system is composed of a lightweight garment integrating a number of sensors measuring the wearer's physiological state and a microcontroller permitting to gather all measured data and make data-based prediction on the wearer's health state, stress and fatigue, etc. The proposed wearable system can continuously monitor key health features using the selected sensors accurately placed at the key positions of the garment. For ensuring wearer's comfort and close contact between sensors and the human body in order to optimize signal quality, the garment that we designed is made of a selected knitted textile structure and fit the specific body morphology. Also, a number of conductive threads have been used to connect the sensors and the microcontroller inside the garment. After the stages of data preprocessing and data fusion, by learning from the measures of the sensors integrated into the garment, a local decision support system has been created for linking fatigue or stress states to the measured physiological signals. In this way, this high level of information can be transmitted to the command center, permitting to make relevant global decisions for offering a better protection of firefighters.