A team of IT volunteers in Barcelona, Spain developed an armband device aimed at protecting firefighters, with sensors that monitor real-time temperature, smoke concentration and humidity, sending alerts to fire command centers to pull firefighters out of dangerous situations.
The team will receive financial and technical support for their open source application Prometeo after having won IBM’s “Call for Code” competition, a coding challenge focused on solutions that ease the impacts of disasters.
One of the competition’s judges, U.N. disaster risk reduction chief Mami Mizutori, has highlighted the increasing number of global forest fires in the past decade sparked by global warming, adding, “It’s more important than ever that we do everything we can to protect firefighters, as they risk their lives to protect us.”
According to chief technology officer Daniel Krook, the IBM Code and Response initiative will work with Prometeo to make the application available to firefighters across Europe, North and South America, and Australia.
