Firefighters are typically exposed to dangerous
environments where a sense of vision, auditory, and
direction is blocked by smoke, dusts, or flame. Some
environments are even “infra-less”; power and
communication infra is destroyed. Any commands and
signals from outside are unavailable, so recognizing
directions and making decisions are usually difficult. To
protect and save lives of firefighters, we propose a system,
ATHENA that provides salient features including tracking
and navigation, emergency monitoring and notification,
and information sharing among co-workers. ATHENA is a
result of an on-going project supported by Korea
Government. This paper provides an overview and
demonstration of ATHENA.
A survey of the survey of the Korean Ministry of Public
Safety and Security reports that more than two for every ten
thousand firefighters died on duty every year [1].
Firefighters typically perform their jobs in disastrous
environments where obstacles such as smoke, dusts, flame,
and/or explosion/boom often block sense of their vision,
auditory, smell, and direction; statistical data reports that
more than 90% of vision and about 99.9% of auditory tend
to be lost in fire environments [2] [3]. Also, firefighters’
apparatus including fire suits, oxygen tanks, helmets, and
boots are typically heavy and often make dull the sense of
touch, smell, and auditory. In addition, substances such as
smoke, dusts are usually deleterious to firefighters’ health,
which sometimes causes injuries or casualties [4] [5] [6].
Furthermore, some environments are even hazardous
“infra-less”; infra including power and communication was
destroyed, thus use of lighting, ventilation, and
communication media (such as GPS, LTE, Wi-Fi) is
impossible, and any signals or commands from outside are
not reachable. That is, firefighters are “isolated” in a fire
scene. There have been reported that many firefighters died
in these infra-less environments [7]-[11]. The reasons were
that firefighters could not recognize correct location and
directions to an exit [7] [8], could not properly detect
emergency situation (e.g., lack of air-pressure, abnormal
heartrate, backdrafts) [9] [10], and/or could not
communicate with co-workers and even lost some of them
[8] [11]; especially in the incident reported in [11], missing
of a veteran firefighter was recognized after more than
seven hours later. There must be a solution to protect and
save lives of firefighters in these hazardous infra-less
environments.
To address this problem, a project has been funded by
the Korea Government, the Ministry of Science, ICT and
Future Planning [12] and the Ministry of Public Safety and
Security [13]. The purpose of this project is to develop a
system, called ATHENA that have capabilities to support
and protect firefighters in infra-less environments.
Project Center in Tirunelveli In this
paper, we introduce ATHENA; what features it provides;
what underlying architectures and system configurations it
has; and how it really works.
The structure of the remaining of the paper is as follows.
In Section 2, ATHENA project is introduced with
ATHENA’s salient features. In Section 3, underlying
architectures and system configurations of ATHENA are
explained, and its demonstration results are given in Section
4. We will conclude the paper with a summary of
contributions and future works in Section 5.
Challenges in Infra-less Fire Environments
Before introducing ATHENA, We first describe the
challenges that firefighters typically encounter in infra-less
fire environments.
• Loss of senses (including sense of vision, auditory,
smell, touch, and direction). Although this challenge may
also exist in infra-available environments, it becomes much
more severe in infra-less environments. As power infra was
destroyed, lighting and ventilation are not available;
imagine damp and dark basement enveloped in smoke and dusts. In this situation, it is difficult to identify obstacles
and find correct direction to a survivor or an exit.
• Loss of connection from outside. Communication
infra was broken, so any guides/commands from outside
cannot be reached to firefighters inside a fire scene.
Without having supports from command center, it is
difficult to monitor current situation and co-worker’s status
and to make decisions (e.g., keep going, or return). In
addition, it is also difficult to identify or estimate current
location and direction without GPS, LTE, or Wi-Fi.
• Loss of communication with co-workers. Firefighters
usually perform their job in a group of 4-5 members. Under
the destroyed communication infra, the only method
available to communicate with co-workers is human voice
or two-way radio. Human voice is too small to
communicate due to roars/booms in fire scenes. Also, using
a two-way radio device is usually difficult since a
firefighter’s hands are often occupied with safety devices.
To address these challenges, a development project has
been funded by the Korea Government, the Ministry of
Science, ICT and Future Planning [12], and the Ministry of
Public Safety and Security [13]; it has been started in 2015
and is still on-going. The purpose is to develop a system
that help protect and save lives of firefighters in infra-less
fire environments. Disaster and Safety IoT Research
Section in Electronics and Telecommunications Research
Institute (ETRI) [14] has been leading the project, with the
Korea Fire Institute (KFI) [15], Sancheong (a company that
produces air respirators and SCBAs) [16], and other related
academic/industry partners. We also have been collaborated
with National Fire Service Academy [17] and a local fire
service headquarter [18] in order to collect real/substantive
user scenarios and validate the project results. The system,
called ATHENA has been developing and its prototype is
currently available. Its salient features are introduced in the
following section.
Salient Features of ATHENA
AHTENA is embedded in each firefighter’s equipment,
and provides the following services to address the
challenges explained.
• PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning) [19] and map
matching. ATHENA detects current location and direction
of a firefighter, which addresses the loss of senses challenge.
ATHENA’s PDR engine continuously tracks and saves
location and direction of the firefighter during working. The
current location of the firefighter is mapped to a point of a
map of the building (this map is downloaded before the
firefighter going into the building), and the map is shown
on head-up display or a firefighter’s hand-held device.
• Safety monitoring and notification. It is difficult to
promptly identify and respond to emergency situations due
to loss of senses and loss of connection from outside.
The
safety monitoring and notification feature provides
simultaneous monitoring of emergency criteria and gives
notification when certain criteria reached. Two types of
emergencies are monitored: environmental and personal
emergency. For the environmental emergency,
environmental data such as gas (e.g., CO) concentration,
temperature, and thermal image, around the firefighter is
monitored. For the personal emergency, the firefighter’s
bio-data (e.g., heartrates, posture), and remaining air in his
air tank is monitored. When any type of emergency happens
(e.g., abnormal heartrate), ATHENA notifies the firefighter
with an alarm sound and a display icon.
• Co-workers monitoring.
EDOT Technologies A group of ATHENA
construct a local Sub-GHz (currently 915 MHz) wireless
network, which addresses the loss of communication with
co-workers challenge. The range of a Sub-GHz network is
wider than Wi-Fi and we believe that it is sufficient to
cover all firefighters working in a same group. One
ATHENA broadcasts critical data (e.g., emergency status,
current location) to other ATHENAs through the network.
Based on the received data, the firefighter can monitor other
members and respond promptly when any member faces a
problem.
• Data sharing and augmented intelligence. ATHENA
has a special feature that can combine information received
from other ATHENAs and provide an augmented
information. For example, an ATHENA, e.g., A01 detects
an obstacle or explosive spot and broadcasts the
information to others; then other ATHENA, e.g., A02,
receives that information and marks that obstacle/spot in the
map that A02 has.
• Navigation service. Firefighters must return safely
after finishing their duty. ATHENA provides navigation
service to guide a firefighter to an exit, which addresses the
loss of senses challenge. The navigation route is calculated
based on locations that the firefighter has passed and
information about detected obstacles and explosive spots.
The disasters such as [7] [8] might not have been happened
if this navigation service was available.
