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In the past, when people lived in the 1950’s, they must have thought that fire departments of the future will make extensive use of robots to put out fires, up to the point where no human intervention is nesseccary at all. From present perspective, now in 2015, it seems the vision they might have seen is not something that will really happen, except for use of UAVs in different missions. However, it appears that technology is getting an honorary role in anything to do with managing emergency events. The Internet of Things trend is starting to pick up in different aspects of our lives, as in the fire-fighting field. According to a nationally ranked official in the United States, the technological development and its uses in emergency management has proven itself beyond any doubt as effective in the fire-fighting field. He adds that in order to produce the most out of the IoT concept in fire-fighting in the emergency events field in general, it must be applied in three consecutive steps: Information gathering, analyzing and transfering it to different consumers.
In a workshop taking place in March of last year at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a report was published, stating that fire-fighting technology is divided to three major areas: environmental (smart build technology, robots and sensors), operational (technology that will allow the firemen themselves to work in a more synchronized fashion and make better decisions), and personal (technological gear to be used on the field by firemen themselves).
One of the challenged to be face in the age of technological fire-fighting is gathering and analyzing the data. In New-York they’ve managed to overcome the problem when they managed to synchronize the information gathered by several city factors into one central point and analyzing it using an advanced algorithm. It should be pointed out that analyzing information from past events and collecting it from a range of sources isn’t everything when a fireman is approaching a fire. Some of the information is unique to every specific fire and must be taken in real-time before extinguishing efforts commence – this is where robots and UAVs come in.
Another substancial challenge for the fire-fighting field is the ability to maintain continuous communication among the firemen and between the firemen and their commanders in the field. Through advanced communication the event manager could receive data gathered by technological devices put inside the firemen’s protective gear, thus deploying his team more efficiently.
The report concludes in outlining four central areas where the best efforts must be put into in order to reach a reality of “smart fire-fighting”:
- Increased use of sensors during a fire event to increase awareness to the happenings in the field and the firemen’s location.
- Gathering more data and analyzing it in advance to manage more efficiently at the time of the event.
- Sharing mutual knowledge between different information systems.
- Developing smart systems that help the decision making process.
