Towards monitoring firefighting teams with the smartphone

Abstract

Two important aspects for efficient and safe firefighting operations are team communication behavior and physical activity coordination. In close cooperation with a firefighting brigade we investigate the potential of modern smartphones to acquire objective data on team communication and physical activity in an automatic way. We envision that such a monitoring is helpful for improving post incident feedback to enhance the efficiency and safety of firefighting operations. In this contribution we present our findings of a feasibility study in which two firefighting teams had to extinguish a kitchen fire. We present the obtained measures of speech and physical activity levels and show how the difference in performance between the two teams can be explained by the smartphone measures.