Moteiv and the University of California, Berkeley are featured in the September issue of Wired Magazine for work on an intelligent fire, safety, and rescue system, aptly called FIRE. The FIRE project is headed by Professor Paul Wright and his gang of students, including Andrew Redfern, Dan Steingart, and Joel Wilson.

The FireEye project highlighted in the Wired article is a head-mounted display (HMD) in the firefighter's mask, designed to relay performance and safety enhancing decision support information in a hands free format. This is exciting because firefighting can be extremely demanding and chaotic where quick decisions are mandatory and information is scarce. Firefighters must constantly divide their attention between many immediate events, which makes it difficult to complete critical tasks such as search and rescue, possibly costing lives.

The FireEye system, led by Joel Wilson, mounts two heads up displays inside the fire fighters helmet -- one transparent, the other opaque. The design is based on user needs studies with the Chicago and Berkeley Fire Departments, with primary design goals being rugged, inexpensive relative to most HMDs, minimally distracting, and easy to operate. The FireEye shows an interactive floor plan map with current locations of the user, their Buddy according to the National Fire Protection Agency "Buddy System", other company members, areas where smoke alarms have activated, and remaining air supply. The GUI is simple to prevent the FireEye from becoming an excessive attention cost.

The Research @ Berkeley Magazine has a much more in depth write up of the FIRE system.

Moteiv is glad to provide Tmote Sky for sensing and Boomerang, an enhanced distribution of the open source operating system TinyOS, which helps the wireless sensor devices sense, react, and report changes in the environment to the mobile firefighters.

Digg this article!

<< Interview with SAP's Ike Nassi | Main | Motes on the Science Channel and Discovery Channel >>