On Thursday, June 5, ECE won the annual college-wide senior design competition. The project, PROBEE Safety, is a proactive firefighter accountability system which will be used by fire officers to quickly identify trapped or injured firefighters operating on an emergency scene. The team was advised by Dr. Christopher Peters, and is composed of Dan Shirley, Corinne Sauer, and Kurt Russell.
The team's goal is to prevent future firefighter fatalities by hastening response times through combining traditional firefighting tactics and emerging technologies. PROBEE is a system composed of field routers located on the firefighter that communicate with lightweight, portable base stations surrounding the perimeter of a building. Information is sent to an Android application that proactively alerts fire officers of impending situations such as low air supply or unsafe ambient temperatures. Since Fall 2013, the team created hardware to be used by each individual firefighter; developed a system to establish an ad hoc network upon arrival to a fire scene; and built an Android application to be used by the fire safety officer monitoring firefighters operating on the scene. The result of their efforts is a solid working prototype, which team leader Dan Shirley hopes to build on.