IdealSensor: On-site rescuer health and position monitoring in emergency situations

In emergency situations rescuers such as firemen or civil defense personnel are working in a harsh, dangerous and often unknown environment: the presence of fire, smoke, water leaks, debris and other obstacles pose severe threats on their life. In addition, in such situation it is not possible to rely on the availability of common infrastructures such as power supplies and telecommunication networks, nor, for indoor environments, on global positioning systems. To support rescuers in these situations we have developed a completely autonomous solution composed by a few devices, acting as fiducial points and called ``anchors'', that can be placed around the area of interest (e.g. a collapsed building) and several wearable devices, referred to as ``tags'' used by the rescuers. The tags monitor in real-time the main biometric parameters (respiration, oximetry, temperature, movement) and the position of the rescuer and forward all these data to a control station in the vicinity of the area. It is worth noting that the entire system is autonomous since it is battery-operated and it uses an ad-hoc isolated communication network. Concerning localization, the system is capable of performing very accurate ranging (distance between two points, e.g. two rescuers) and 3D positioning (i.e. absolute position with respect to a reference system) both outdoor and indoor, without relying on GPS or similar systems.