Enhancing the safety of firefighters in intervention with a wearable heart rate sensor

Details

Supervisors

Bol, David

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électromécanicien, à finalité spécialisée: mécatronique

Abstract

enFirefighting is a stressful and physically demanding job, and it can have fatal consequences on the firefighter if the stress (psychological and/or physiological) is not well managed. A review of modern firefighting personal protective equipment shows that electronics already helps in many tactical and safety aspects: it improves communication, perception and coordination. However, vital signs are generally not monitored by these systems. Heart rate, respiration, hydration, body temperature and body movements are all variables that can be monitored to assess the firefighter's level of exhaustion, evaluate their fitness or detect injuries and cardiovascular diseases. For each variable, many sensing techniques tried in the scientific literature are reviewed in this work, although some are not fit for the application. A special focus on heart rate was chosen because it's highly correlated with stress and easy to sense. Photoplethysmography (PPG) was chosen to sense the heart rate because it's simple, cheap and non invasive. A study on the accuracy of open-source heart-rate-tracking algorithms based on PPG is then conducted using two datasets of recorded signals and reference heart rate data. Open-source algorithms perform well in the absence of noise caused by motion, but do not perform sufficiently well when this noise is too dominant. An approach that uses accelerometer data was tested and yielded better results, although not sufficient. More advanced signal processing techniques are therefore required. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype was successfully built using a PPG sensor evaluation kit. The software was modified to be more robust, although some improvements are to be made. Other aspects, such as power consumption, battery technology and integration into firefighting equipment, also have to be addressed.