Vital Responder

Monitoring Stress among

First Responder Professionals

Outline

• Where we come from

• Vital Responder project• Wearable technology – Vital Jacket®

• Conclusions

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University of Aveiro

• Established in 1973• Bac. In Telecom. – 1st

graduate course• Modern Campus

(~900.000 m2, 40 buildings)

• ~12 500 students; ~900 Teachers

• Member of ECIU – Euro. Cons. Of Innovative Universities

• www.ua.pt

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Dep. Electronics, Telecom. & Informatics

• ~80 PhDs• Grad., MSc. and Ph.D. in

Electronics, Telecom, Informatics.

• Close related to Industry, (PTelecom, Siemens Comm…)

• Several spin-off companies (MicroI/O, BioDevices…)

• Two interface Institutes: IT and IEETA

• www.det.ua.pt

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IEETA-Resources• Located in the campus of the University of Aveiro

• Human Resources:~100 people; ~50 PhDs, ~50 post-grad students, 5 adm. staff

• Fundamental and applied R&D in Electronics and Telematics (Biomedical has been major target)

• Several Scientific Prizes:

IBM Award (2)EFNM - “Marie Curry Prize”EUREPA – European Epilepsy AccademyLPCE - “Tecnifar Prize”(2)etc. www.ieeta.pt

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IEETA-Organization

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Health Information & Systems R&D Group@IEETA

www.ieeta.pt/sias

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Vital Responder

Monitoring Stress among

First Responder Professionals

… coming back to the theme …

Consortium

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Associate partners

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Stress in Critical Events• Critical events induce fatigue and stress among

first responder professionals such as Fire Fighters, Policemen, Paramedics, etc.

• There are different fatigue and stress factors and even pathologies identified in these professionals.

• It is known that, in average, FR live significantly less than the rest of the population.

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Example: Fire Fighters Heat Stress

• Fire fighters (FF) are subjected to high temperature leading to fatigue and Heat Stress– They are considered under HS when deep

body temperature exceeds 38°C (100.4°F).

• This condition may lead to different heat diseases.

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Heat diseases in FF• Heat stroke

– body's system of temperature regulation fails– Heat stroke is a life threatening medical

emergency (organ failure, nauseas, etc.)– Very difficult to predict its occurrence

• Heat exhaustion– headache, nausea, vertigo, weakness, thirst, and

giddiness.– Many times leads to fainting

• life threatening in many critical and emergency situations

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Heat deseases detection

• Very difficult to diagnose.• Nowadays based only on body and

environment temperature measures.• Inference of stress just from temperature. • No inner physiology of the human body is

used for feedback on reaction to stress and probability of heat stroke or exhaustion.

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Stress measure in humans

• ECG is commonly used to measure stress in human beings

• R-R variability is the main technique used for this purpose

• For this measure to be effective, we need to have a simple and effective way of long-term monitoring (at least one working day) of diagnosis quality ECG.

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Vital Responder Project

Vital Responder Presentation Layer

First Responder 1

First Responder N

Wearable Technology

Sensor Network & RF location

Vital Responder Monitoring Platform

Data Analysis

Building 1

Building N

Terrain

Building info and sensors

Building network

Building Monitoring Platform

Terrain info (GIS) and Sensors

WAN / satellite network

Terrain Monitoring Platform

Other projects on First Responder operationscan integrate through the different platforms

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Vital Responder project

• Objectives: – Develop the Next Generation wearable intelligent

garment for vital signs and other body information monitoring.

– Deploy a novel mobile telematic infrastructure to enable the continuous online monitoring.

• Novel ad-hoc sensor network protocols• New radio-frequency location services (indoor and outdoor)

– Explore post-event analysis for better event detectors

– Explore integration with intelligent building systems to better respond to emergency and critical events

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Wearable “platform”

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GIS integration

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See VJ videos on YouTube !(search – “Vital Jacket”)

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… estão desde já convidados a visitar AVEIRO

• Obrigado!

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