Conclusions

Being a fireman means performing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Facing an operating
theater (OT) of thick smoke, high flames and high temperatures can lead to many health
problems and accidents. Thus, it is crucial to monitor the environmental conditions that firefighters
undergo. Thus, the proposed solution -Vital Helmet- is essential to safeguard the lives of these
professionals.
Most of the research in gas monitoring is based on heavy and unpractical devices. Furthermore,
firemen have no option to choose which gases they want to monitor. As far we now, we
propose a major novelty on the gas monitorization and to the best of our knowledge we are involved
in the single one project that provide an adaptable solution to the emergency scenario.
In this MSc thesis we proposed the Vital Helmet project, an international project for the monitorization
of firefighters in action. Moreover, we have submitted some tests to evaluate our hardware
design as well as our solution. We successfully finished a prototype that measures gas concentrations
from the surrounding environment and sends the data to a PC through UART. The
solution is running without problems. However, it is still necessary to calibrate the sensors. We
are now finishing, the I2C communication between each of the slaves and the master, whose implementation
is much more complex. However, we are still working on it.
Our solution has great potential compared to other solutions and technologies because it is a
new generation of personal gas detectors. Besides being a small, compact and practical solution,
Vital Helmet is able to adapt to different scenarios and, also important, it is low cost. Furthermore,
our solution is versatile, since it enables to switch between sensors and improve the firemen performance,
warning in advance of risky situations. Once each slave has its own microcontroller and
all the data processing is done at the sensor, our general solution is adaptable to different types of
sensors.