CoenoFire: monitoring performance indicators of firefighters in real-world missions using smartphones

Abstract

Firefighting is a dangerous task and many research projects have aimed at supporting firefighters during missions by developing new and often costly equipment. In contrast to previous approaches, we use the smartphone to monitor firefighters during real-world missions in order to provide objective data that can be used in post-incident briefings and trainings. In this paper, we present CoenoFire, a smartphone based sensing system aimed at monitoring temporal and behavioral performance indicators of firefighting missions. We validate the performance metrics showing that they can indicate why certain teams performed faster than others in a training scenario conducted by 16 firefighting teams. Furthermore, we deployed CoenoFire over a period of six weeks in a professional fire brigade. In total, 71 firefighters participated in our study and the collected data includes 76 real-world missions totaling to over 148 hours of mission data. Additionally, we visualize real-world mission data and show how mission feedback is supported by the data.