1. Vital Responder Monitoring Stress among First Responder Professionals

2. Outline Where we come from Vital Responder project Wearable technology – Vital Jacket ® Conclusions 2

3. University of Aveiro Established in 1973 Bac. In Telecom. – 1 st graduate course Modern Campus (~900.000 m 2, 40 buildings) ~12 500 students; ~900 Teachers Member of ECIU – Euro. Cons. Of Innovative Universities www.ua.pt 3

4. Dep. Electronics, Telecom. & Informatics ~80 PhDs Grad., MSc. and Ph.D. in Electronics, Telecom, Informatics. Close related to Industry, (PTelecom, Siemens Comm…) Several spin-off companies (MicroI/O, BioDevices…) Two interface Institutes: IT and IEETA www.det.ua.pt 4

5. IEETA-Resources Located in the campus of the University of Aveiro Human Resources:~100 people; ~50 PhDs, ~50 post-grad students, 5 adm. staff Fundamental and applied R&D in Electronics and Telematics (Biomedical has been major target) Several Scientific Prizes: IBM Award (2) EFNM - “Marie Curry Prize” EUREPA – European Epilepsy Accademy LPCE - “Tecnifar Prize”(2) etc. www.ieeta.pt 5

6. IEETA-Organization 6

7. Health Information & Systems R&D Group@IEETA www.ieeta.pt/sias 7

8. Vital Responder Monitoring Stress among First Responder Professionals … coming back to the theme …

9. Consortium 9

10. Associate partners 10

11. Stress in Critical Events Critical events induce fatigue and stress among first responder professionals such as Fire Fighters, Policemen, Paramedics, etc. There are different fatigue and stress factors and even pathologies identified in these professionals. It is known that, in average, FR live significantly less than the rest of the population. 11

12. Example: Fire Fighters Heat Stress Fire fighters (FF) are subjected to high temperature leading to fatigue and Heat Stress –They are considered under HS when deep body temperature exceeds 38°C (100.4°F). This condition may lead to different heat diseases. 12

13. Heat diseases in FF Heat stroke –body's system of temperature regulation fails –Heat stroke is a life threatening medical emergency (organ failure, nauseas, etc.) – Very difficult to predict its occurrence Heat exhaustion –headache, nausea, vertigo, weakness, thirst, and giddiness. –Many times leads to fainting life threatening in many critical and emergency situations 13

14. Heat deseases detection Very difficult to diagnose. Nowadays based only on body and environment temperature measures. Inference of stress just from temperature. No inner physiology of the human body is used for feedback on reaction to stress and probability of heat stroke or exhaustion. 14

15. Stress measure in humans ECG is commonly used to measure stress in human beings R-R variability is the main technique used for this purpose For this measure to be effective, we need to have a simple and effective way of long- term monitoring (at least one working day) of diagnosis quality ECG. 15

16. Vital Responder Project 16

17. Vital Responder project Objectives: –Develop the Next Generation wearable intelligent garment for vital signs and other body information monitoring. –Deploy a novel mobile telematic infrastructure to enable the continuous online monitoring. Novel ad-hoc sensor network protocols New radio-frequency location services (indoor and outdoor) –Explore post-event analysis for better event detectors –Explore integration with intelligent building systems to better respond to emergency and critical events 17

18. Wearable “platform” 18

19. GIS integration 19

20. See VJ videos on YouTube ! (search – “Vital Jacket”) 20

21. … estão desde já convidados a visitar AVEIRO Obrigado! Mais informação em www.brainimaging.pt