Smart garments for emergency operators: the proeTEX project

  • Authors:

  • Davide Curone;Emanuele Lindo Secco;Alessandro Tognetti;Giannicola Loriga;Gabriela Dudnik;Michele Risatti;Rhys Whyte;Annalisa Bonfiglio;Giovanni Magenes

  • Affiliations:

  • European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering, Pavia, Italy;European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering, Pavia, Italy;Centro E. Piaggio, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;D'Appolonia, Genova, Italy and SMARTEX, Prato, Italy;Centre Suisse d'Electronique et Microtechnique, Neuchatel, Switzerland;Diadora S.p.A, Caerano San Marco, Italy;Zarlink Semiconductor Inc., Caldicot, UK;Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy and CNR-INFM, Modena, Italy;Department of Computer Engineering and Systems Science of the University of Pavia and European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering, Pavia, Italy

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine - Special section on new and emerging technologies in bioinformatics and bioengineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Financed by the EuropeanCommission, a consortium of 23 European partners, consisting of universities, research institutions, industries, and organizations operating in the field of emergency management, is developing a new generation of "smart" garments for emergency-disaster personnel. Garments integrate newly developed wearable and textile solutions, such as commercial portable sensors and devices, in order to continuously monitor risks endangering rescuers' lives. The system enables detection of health-state parameters of the users (heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature, blood oxygen saturation, position, activity, and posture) and environmental variables (external temperature, presence of toxic gases, and heat flux passing through the garments), to process data and remotely transmit useful information to the operation manager. The European-integrated project, called Proe-TEX (Protection e-Textiles: Micro-Nano-Structured fiber systems for Emergency-Disaster Wear) started on February, 2006 and will end on July, 2010. During this 4.5 years period, three subsequent generations of sensorized garments are being released. This paper proposes an overview of the project and gives a description of the second-generation prototypes, delivered at the end of 2008.