The VR final report was submitted to the Leadership of the Carnegie-Mellon|Portugal program last friday, June 7th 2013.

Congrats to all the contributors to the project and their results.

We are already looking forward to the next VR project (VR 2.0) that will start next July 1st !

Here is the abstract.

The goal of the Vital Responder research project was to explore the synergies between innovative wearable technologies, scattered sensor networks, intelligent building technology and precise localization services to provide secure, reliable and effective first-response systems in critical emergency scenarios. Critical events, such as natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, induce fatigue and stress in first responders, such as firefighters, policemen and paramedics. There are distinct fatigue and stress factors (and even pathologies) identified among these professionals. Nevertheless, previous work has uncovered a lack of in-action real-time monitoring and decision technologies that can lead to in-depth understanding of the physiological stress and fatigue processes among these professionals and to the development of adequate response mechanisms. Our “silver bullet” to address these challenges was a suite of non-intrusive wearable technologies, as inconspicuous as a t-shirt, capable of gathering relevant information about the individual first responder and disseminating this information through a wireless sensor network. Furthermore, a webservices based archive & QUERY/retrieve database was implemented to provide distributed access to all the information and some client apps for data analysis were implemented.

The project was organized in 4 main R&D vectors: 1) Wearable technology; 2) Sensor net; 3) Multimedia integration; 4) Signal analysis; which produced a large number of achievements that are summarized in Table 1.

The VR project was presented at the "CMU-P: An Entrepreneurial University-Industry Ecosystem in ICT" conference as an "Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives" example for the coming phase 2 of the program.

Here is the open slide of the talk:

The presentation is available on the documents area.