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Activity Funded

Wearable Physiological System to Monitor Firefighter’s Overall Status

Sistema de monitorização fisiológica do tipo "wearable" para monitorizar o estado geral de saúde de bombeiros

Reference
PCIF/SSO/0063/2018
Project Start Date
2020-01-02
Project End Date
2022-12-31
Principal Investigator
Coinvestigator
Scientific Area
Medical and health sciences
Funding Program
Concurso de Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico no Âmbito da Prevenção e Combate a Incêndios Florestais - 2018

Abstract

Wildfire firefighting (WLFF) is a seasonal occupation that intrinsically requires components of strength and endurance for strenuous labor over long durations. In general, firefighting involves strenuous physical activity while wearing heavy and insulating personal protective equipment (PPE) in extreme conditions. In firefighters, as in any safety-sensitive profession, the resulting interaction between occupational stress and individual susceptibility to illness demands careful management. This represents a dual challenge to organizations responsible for the well-being of the workers engaged in strenuous physical exertion, imposing requirements to be vigilant for, or even curtail, situations that may result in high physiological strain in healthy personnel and also to identify and protect vulnerable individuals. The emergence and ubiquitous uptake of wearable physiological and medical monitoring devices might help to address this challenge but requires that the right questions are asked in sourcing, developing, validating and applying such technologies. Non-invasive wearable physiological monitoring can provide predictions about an individual’s overall status and health from their real-time physiological state. This approach offers significant improvements in population-based predictions derived from ambient conditions and the general context of an operation. However, available commercial systems mostly do not satisfy the requirements for occupational use. Even when these systems offer something more than raw physiological data, computed information is usually based on proprietary algorithms that cannot be adequately reviewed and validated, making the output unusable. Current research on the development of real-time monitoring systems for occupational settings confirms the feasibility of devices using physiological signals to examine the impact of occupational tasks and improve the management of health-related consequences. However, available literature also evidence that most of the up-to-date systems even with proven reliability within occupational settings, are not feasible for applications in real context as they usually entail high costs and involve invasive procedures, making them unaffordable for usage within a representative working population. Thus, with a basis in physiology and application of computational techniques, it can beevidenced that the focus should be in algorithms that allow simple low-cost equipment, such as chest belts or wristbands associated to cardio-frequency meters, thermal or even stain gauges sensors, develop a reliable system, reproducible in a large scale, to be used within harsh operational environments. A decision support system based on physiological monitoring is envisioned to respond to this need. Specifically, the objective is to develop, validate and optimize a monitoring system, able of alerting on the overall physical condition of a firefighter, applicable in firefighting and non-firefighting environments, and based on real-time collection of the individual physiological behavior data in operational situations. The system will be able to give warnings, not only on the health condition but also on the geographic location, to the own and to the command. Accordingly, scientific background from previous projects with the Army (Sergeants School and Command Regiment), will be used and an approach based on the establishment of alert alarms resulting from integrated physiological assessments, will be reformulated and improved according to the firefighter’s specific needs. The proposed system will receive information from sensors and will perform a clinical diagnosis on its carrier. For this, the collected data will be used as input parameters to predesigned decision support algorithms to provide a periodic signal on the individual’s fatigue state. This periodic warning signal is designed according to a set of pre-established health categories which define various levels of fatigue. At higher levels and more extreme scenarios, the system may indicate the slowing down of activity or even the evacuation of the individual. Fatigue levels will be stablished by a set of conditions resulting from literature and legislation review and validated by medical expert knowledge. They will be based on the integrated definitions of the chosen variables in terms of thresholds and specific activity patterns. The proposed system will be able to carry out analysis of available valid sensory recordings performing non-monotonic reasoning on data. System validation will be performed through a combination of laboratory trials, simulated events for extreme scenarios and lastly, real situations by a sample of firefighters, in order to ensure its applicability not only for firefighting conditions but also to any safety-sensitive occupational group.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Instituto de Ciência e Inovação em Engenharia Mecânica e Engenharia Industrial (INEGI)

Funding 198.980,00 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

198.980,00 €