Supporting first responders by wearable computing solutions - the wearIT@work show case

This paper focuses on the state-of-the art and future of wearable computing applications in fire fighting. The research is performed in the context of the EU FP6 project wearIT@work. As the project strongly follows a cyclic and user centred design approach much effort was put on investigations with end users in the four application domains of maintenance, production, healthcare and emergency response. However, in this paper solely emergency response related issues are addressed. A specific three layer simulation process for the evaluation was developed and demonstrators of wearable computing solutions were achieved and evaluations with end users performed. Key findings concerning the research approach and technological as well as user experiments are shown.