MONITORING FIRE-FIGHTERS OPERATING IN HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS WITH BODY-AREA WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS 1

We present a prototype application based on body area wireless sensor network exploiting the MaD-WiSe data management system which allows the operation control staff to remotely monitor the status of the firefighters in the field. Each firefighter is equipped with a set of wireless sensors that acquire both physiological data and data related to the microclimate within the coverall. Sensors self organize into a wireless network and cooperate to issue sensed data and alarms to the control staff. 1.0 INTRODUCTION The intervention in fields affected by nuclear, chemical or bacteriological pollution is carried out by firefighters equipped by Personal Protective Equipments (PPE), with Totally Encapsulated Chemical Suit (TECS) which completely insulate them from the external environment. Besides being quite uncomfortable, these TECS may make difficult communication between fire-fighters and between the fire-fighters and the incident command system. They also prevent any form of status or health monitoring of the fire-fighters, thus making it very difficult to provide support and help to the men operating in the field. Recent technological advances enabled the integration of wireless communication technologies, transducers and microcontrollers into tiny, self-powered devices. A number of these devices (also called sensors) deployed in an environment can form a wireless sensor network [1] to provide unattended monitoring and control support to remote users. In particular the user can program the network with data sensing, processing and collecting tasks, and it can receive the results without any physical intervention on the sensors themselves. This usage of the network is enforced by recently introduced database-like paradigms [2], [3] in which data management activity performed in the network is remotely controlled by interactively issuing queries, expressed in a high level language (such as SQL), which specify what data are of interest for a certain task, and how they should be manipulated. Changing the behavior of the data management activity in the network corresponds to execute actions like stopping a query execution and/or formulating a new one. Along this research trend we have proposed in [4] a new database approach to data management in sensor networks (called MaD-WiSe) that attempts to overtake some of the typical limitations of systems recently proposed in this field. More specifically our approach addresses the following issues: • in-network distributed processing of queries that relate data acquired by different nodes; • execution of temporal aggregates; • offering opportunities for network topology and data statistics aware query optimization; Following this …