A Personal LPWAN Remote Monitoring System

Firefighters are equipped with an immobility detector device also called the Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) that is integrated into the user's Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA). If a firefighter remains motionless for a certain period of time, a loud audible alert is triggered to notify the Firefighter Assist and Search Team (FAST) deployed in the area of intervention that the wearer of the PASS device is in trouble and in need of rescue. However, this device is not reliable enough since it triggers frequently false positives which lead to developing a tolerance for sounding alarms among the crew. As a consequence, they do not seem to be concerned about it as they should and the alarms are just ignored sometimes. In this paper, we propose a PERsonal LPWAN sYstem (PERLY) prototype for state assessment and localization of Firefighters. The latter's specifications were set by personnel from the fire and emergency response department of the Doubs brigade. The aim was to make the system more reliable compared to the PASS, to add additional important functionalities, and to minimize the false positive alarms.