Vital Responder

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Vital Responder

• Monitoring Stress among
• First Responder Professionals

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Outline

• Where we come from
• Vital Responder project
• Wearable technology Vital Jacket
• Conclusions

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University of Aveiro

• Established in 1973
• Bac. In Telecom. 1st graduate course
• Modern Campus (900.000 m2, 40 buildings)
• 12 500 students 900 Teachers
• Member of ECIU Euro. Cons. Of Innovative
  Universities
• www.ua.pt

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Dep. Electronics, Telecom. Informatics

• 80 PhDs
• Grad., MSc. and Ph.D. in Electronics, Telecom,
  Informatics.
• Close related to Industry, (PTelecom, Siemens
  Comm)
• Several spin-off companies (MicroI/O,
  BioDevices)
• Two interface Institutes IT and IEETA
• www.det.ua.pt

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IEETA-Resources

• Located in the campus of the University of Aveiro
• Human Resources100 people 50 PhDs, 50
  post-grad students, 5 adm. staff
• Fundamental and applied RD in Electronics and
  Telematics (Biomedical has been major target)
• Several Scientific Prizes

IBM Award (2) EFNM - Marie Curry Prize EUREPA
European Epilepsy Accademy LPCE - Tecnifar
Prize(2) etc.
www.ieeta.pt
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IEETA-Organization
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Health Information Systems RD Group_at_IEETA
www.ieeta.pt/sias
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Vital Responder
coming back to the theme

• Monitoring Stress among
• First Responder Professionals

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Consortium
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Associate partners
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Stress in Critical Events

• Critical events induce fatigue and stress among
  first responder professionals such as Fire
  Fighters, Policemen, Paramedics, etc.
• There are different fatigue and stress factors
  and even pathologies identified in these
  professionals.
• It is known that, in average, FR live
  significantly less than the rest of the
  population.

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Example Fire Fighters Heat Stress

• Fire fighters (FF) are subjected to high
  temperature leading to fatigue and Heat Stress
• They are considered under HS when deep body
  temperature exceeds 38C (100.4F).
• This condition may lead to different heat
  diseases.

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Heat diseases in FF

• Heat stroke
• body's system of temperature regulation fails
• Heat stroke is a life threatening medical
  emergency (organ failure, nauseas, etc.)
• Very difficult to predict its occurrence
• Heat exhaustion
• headache, nausea, vertigo, weakness, thirst, and
  giddiness.
• Many times leads to fainting
• life threatening in many critical and emergency
  situations

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Heat deseases detection

• Very difficult to diagnose.
• Nowadays based only on body and environment
  temperature measures.
• Inference of stress just from temperature.
• No inner physiology of the human body is used for
  feedback on reaction to stress and probability of
  heat stroke or exhaustion.

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Stress measure in humans

• ECG is commonly used to measure stress in human
  beings
• R-R variability is the main technique used for
  this purpose
• For this measure to be effective, we need to have
  a simple and effective way of long-term
  monitoring (at least one working day) of
  diagnosis quality ECG.

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Vital Responder Project
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Vital Responder project

• Objectives
• Develop the Next Generation wearable intelligent
  garment for vital signs and other body
  information monitoring.
• Deploy a novel mobile telematic infrastructure to
  enable the continuous online monitoring.
• Novel ad-hoc sensor network protocols
• New radio-frequency location services (indoor and
  outdoor)
• Explore post-event analysis for better event
  detectors
• Explore integration with intelligent building
  systems to better respond to emergency and
  critical events

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Wearable platform
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GIS integration
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See VJ videos on YouTube !(search Vital
Jacket)
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• Obrigado!

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