Smart Sensing Uniforms for Emergency Operators Rita Paradiso 1, a , Lionel Bourdon 2, b , Giannicola Loriga 1, c 1 Smartex s.r.l. , via Lungo il Ficarello, 59100 Prato, Italy 2 Centre de recherches du service de santé des armées, Département des Facteurs Humains, 24, avenue des Maquis du Grésivaudan, B.P. 87 38702 La Tronche, France. a rita@smartex.it b lbourdon@crssa.net c loriga@smartex.it Keywords: Smart fabrics and interactive textile (SFIT), wearable monitoring systems. . Abstract. Textile integration of smart sensor systems is the key technology for the success of future e-garments oriented to emergency operators. Ubiquitous recording and transmission of human and environmental data will allow combining comfort and protection leveraging with the existing smart textile, microelectronics and telecommunication technologies. The challenge offered by emergency situation is mainly in the difficulty to acquire data in a very aggressive environment, during hard physical activity; conditions that will increase the risks of signals artefacts, as well as the presence of positive and negative false events. Security is addressed through the implementation of systems combining body sensing platform, for health alertness and environment sensing platform for context awareness; the full system has also to guarantee protective functionality. State of art textile technology allows the monitoring of heart and respiratory rate, humidity rate, activity rate, GSR and EMG, while core and external temperature, posture via accelerometers, absolute position via GPS are easily monitored through standard sensors. The body sensing platform requires a direct contact with the operator skin leading to the implementation of a sensing inner garment, at the same time environment platform are integrated in a protective jacket that is also hosting the alarm systems and the electronic unit for signal processing and transmission hardware. This paper is reporting about a study done with a pioneer e-textile system named Wealthy on healthy subjects during extreme conditions. Wealthy platform is currently evolving in a new one, specially designed for emergency scenarios, developed in the frame of the project Proetex, a preliminary description of the new system is presented; the new system that is under first testing phase, has been designed to be used without interfering with operator activities. Introduction Research and development in smart wearable systems and applications for personalized services, especially for monitoring purposes, has significantly increased worldwide over the last few years [1]. The motivation in the health areas is guided by the need to guarantee an high level of security and safety during emergency scenarios for the operator, providing easy access to all the environmental information from anywhere, anytime, to as many people as possible. Smart, wearable monitoring systems [2] have the capability of supporting the extension/expansion of health monitoring services outside the domain of classical establishments, and monitoring users over extended periods of time. New promising research recently emerged from the miniaturization Advances in Science and Technology Vol. 60 (2008) pp 101-110 Online available since 2008/Sep/02 at www.scientific.net © (2008) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AST.60.101 All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of TTP, www.ttp.net. (ID: 131.151.244.7, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Columbia, USA-15/08/14,20:23:49)