Situation and location awareness in harsh environment

Enhanced environment awareness is a key element of life protection in dangerous situations. Thus the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) clothing industry is forced in the direction to develop highly innovative “intelligent” products, and equip their products with sensors and actuators combined with smart technologies. Besides basic functions of protection, thermal and ergonomic comfort, these new generation protective garments have additional functions such as monitoring and/or alarming for prevention in case of emergency situation. Such systems are costly because even if the clothing and engineering parts of the development are feasible, their combination is far from trivial. The different system parts have different requirements, and these requirements are sometimes not compatible with each other. Parameters such as cost, bulkiness, accuracy, independency, scalability, robustness are key parameters, which can cause high acceptance or usage prevention rapidly by the end-users. Our research is focusing on the seamless integration of the various subsystems to develop effective and user friendly, intelligent situation aware personal protection systems. Our solution helps to receive accurate information about user performance and activity conditions. The main goal of our work is to adapt the already existing monitoring solution and provide it to people working in harsh environment. The paper describes the results of our development with the description of the main functionalities.