Wban-Assisted Navigation for Firefighters in Indoor Environments
Sarra Berrahal, Noureddine Boudriga and Mhamed Chammem
Technological advances in wearable and integrated sensing devices have witnessed an increase of interest in using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for advanced sensing purposes including monitoring, tracking and controlling systems and states. This paper proposes a WBAN-based control system to assist firefighters combating indoor fires (and other natural disasters) and finding their way to save human lives. To this end, we develop a novel real-time graph, called Temporal Mobile Weighted Graph, to integrate special functions such as (relative) localization, safe navigation, continuous communication, and efficient hazard estimation. We design a real time solution aiming at monitoring the firefighter’s health, controlling the environment changes, and predicting firefighters’ isolation time by estimating the horizon of risk deterioration. A radio communication monitoring module is implemented to assist firefighter’s mobility and minimize radio interferences. A set of numerical experiments has been conducted to evaluate the performance of the system.
Keywords: Indoor navigation, localization, body area network, firefighting, risk estimation, radio communication.