UC Berkeley teams seek ways to increase safety in battling blazes

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- The dark smoke is thick all around you. The open door you thought was right behind you has disappeared. Your buddy has faded into the haze.\nNow you are alone in an unfamiliar building, with no idea how to escape or how much air you have left before you pass out.\nThis is the everyday world of firefighters. Most make it out of burning buildings unharmed, but 100 firefighters die on the job each year from smoke inhalation, falling objects and other injuries.\nNow two UC Berkeley teams are turning their brainpower and their high-tech acumen to the difficult problem of getting firefighters into and out of buildings safely.\nOne research group is using a miniature video camera to project a building's floorplan onto firefighters' face masks so they can know where they are at all times.\nA second study, still in its early stages, would use small wireless computers to allow firefighters to track each other and to enable fire supervisors to monitor everyone in the burning building.\nOnce the computer scientists tackle these basics, they have high hopes for even more comprehensive technology to make firefighters safer.\n"We are going to be able to track them, locate them and monitor their body health," said Richard Nowakowski, who is working with one UC Berkeley group as special projects coordinator for Chicago's office of emergency management and communication.\nEvery year, 4,400 Americans are killed and another 25,100 injured in fires, with property damage estimated at $8.6 billion, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. Despite massive technological leaps, limited public funds and occasional technology phobia has kept many of those advances from reaching firefighting.\nBut post-Sept. 11 awareness of the importance of firefighters and other emergency personnel in terrorism response has led to more research on how these technologies can help. Both UC Berkeley projects are being funded in part by program called CITRIS, which develops computer technology to serve society.\nGiving firefighters the right kind of help is not easy. They need only the most vital information in a form that is easy to digest. Too much or badly timed information could distract them from the task at hand. They cannot be asked to type or talk or give other feedback.\nAlso, they are notoriously tough on equipment, which, even on the best of days, gets slung onto the back of trucks and dragged into burning buildings.\n"If you build it, they will break it," said Leila Takayama, a UC Berkeley undergraduate in cognitive science who has interviewed dozens of emergency workers for the firefighter tracking project.\nThe firefighter heads-up display, which is projected onto the users large, rugged face masks, came out of a collaboration between Chicago's firefighters and UC Berkeley.\nNowakowski, who oversees research for Chicago's 911 services, read about professor Paul Wright's graduate student work to create a display inside motorcycle helmets. He contacted the group, who quickly offered their services.\nAfter Sept. 11, the city required all buildings 32 stories and higher to submit electronic copies of their floor plans. These plans are then transferred into a video projector, which displays a small version onto a mask. Eventually, the team would like to display how much air the firefighter has left in his tank as well.\n"As he traverses through a building floor plan, he knows where he started, where he's been and where he's going," Nowakowski explained. "He knows how much air he has expended and how much air he has left."\n"Right now we have the basic stuff done," Wright said, explaining that now they just have to make it more practical for everyday use.\nThe second project would allow firefighters to track each other and, perhaps more importantly, be tracked by a battalion chief or other supervisor.\nXiaodong Jiang, a Berkeley computer science graduate student working on the project, said each firefighter would have a "personal server" that would collect information on the firefighters around him and transmit his location to them.\nIt might also be able to exchange information about the conditions in each room, such as temperature and humidity that would warn other emergency workers what they are facing, or whether the firefighter is moving or has quit breathing.\nJiang said the team is still trying to figure out what is the best way to communicate with firefighters in such a loud environment with so much going on. They are looking at things that vibrate or flash or sound an alarm, and they are also working with the other team's heads-up display.\n"You don't want to be too distracting," Jiang said.\nRight now, the team has dozens of ideas about features they could add to the device, so the scientists and firefighters have to figure out what is really needed and what isn't, Takayama said.\n"We can't actually build them all," she said.