Ten years from now, the worlds of public safety and emergency management will look like what’s on TV today.

Adam Stone | March 2, 2016

The next-generation fire suit could have a multitude of technological features.

Manuel Navarro has a relatively simple request. He would just like to know: Where is everybody?

“For years we’ve talked about knowing precisely where our firefighters are within an incident, and no one has come up with the best way to do that,” said Navarro, a division chief in the Menlo Park, Calif., fire department. He also serves on the technology council of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. “We go on the radio and say, ‘Do you have all your people?’ But we don’t know where those people are. They may not know it themselves. For us, that is a massive safety issue.”

For years technology has been promising to fix the issue but, like many in the first responder community, Navarro has been less than impressed. “Just about every firefighter has an iPad,” he said. “But if I get to an active incident and you have your nose down in the computer not watching what is going on, I’m going to be talking to you later. You aren’t there to take pictures and take notes.”

Now technology is taking a new turn. Supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the high-tech community has begun developing a new generation of devices that go far beyond laptops and tablets.

Referred to generally as the Internet of Things, the new wearable technologies integrate into firefighters’ existing suits, making available a range of sensors that can deliver vital data on the status of a rescuer in the midst of an unfolding event. Observers say the new wearables could dramatically alter the face of firefighting.

The Possibilities

The catalog of wearables is growing fast, in part because this is an industry still very much in its infancy, one dominated by small startups. These devices are still finding their feet in the mainstream market and even more tentatively among emergency responders. Still, early offerings give a sense of where things are headed. Some of these include:

• puncture-detection sensors woven into fabric, so that if an officer is shot, a 911 call would go out automatically;
• a range of fabrics that generate electricity by the body’s own movements, keeping devices at the ready without the need to haul extra batteries and chargers;
• a mouth guard that serves as a communication device, using bone conduction to channel signals through the teeth and jawbone, conveying sound even in a noisy environment; and
• wireless camera and video capabilities built into eyewear.

One good example comes from CyberTimez, a Washington, D.C., company working on a solution to Navarro’s longstanding lament, that is, knowing a firefighter’s location. The company’s Cyber Trackz device, which should go to market this year, follows a rescuer’s trail in much the same way consumer exercise wearables help fitness buffs count their steps.

“Right now there are a lot of people [tracking location] from the outside in, using GPS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth triangulation where beacons and sensors have to be dropped, and even then they can only determine where someone might be,” said CyberTimez CEO and co-founder Sean Tibbetts. By having the wearer passively broadcast location data, Cyber Trackz aims to make things simpler and more accurate.

Interestingly, the company did not start out in the emergency response business. In fact, its location tracking technology came to life as a means to help the disabled find their way home should they become lost or confused. This is a driving trend within firefighter wearables, this migration from the consumer space into the emergency realm.