Real time mobile system for support in firefighting environments

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

This dissertation addresses work being performed within the context of the Fire Forest Finder system, fulfilling the requests for a multi-information application intended for a vehicle mounted mobile device. The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a solution running on a PDA device that provides support in Fire Fighting environments. The user has access to: multi-information data of the theater of operations, an automotive navigation system (TomTom Navigator™) and a text messaging capability. The hardware present on this system is a DLoG X7™ industrial graded PDA that possesses the right sturdiness for this task. The software developed consists of three distinct interfaces: an appropriately customized TomTom Navigator™ interface for the end-users of this system and two additional applications were created to allow a proper visualization of the available information and also have an interface with text messaging input/output capabilities; It is important to refer that the GSM protocol, text messaging service in particular was the chosen communication mean due to the fact that this network has, at the time this dissertation was finished, the better and most reliable coverage of remote areas, such as the forests for which this system is intended to. In terms of experimental validation a series of performance, intuitiveness and usability tests were performed and analyzed in detail with the purpose of demonstrating the validity of the ideas presented. The thesis is completed by the depiction of the achieved results with the subsequent discussion and identification of open points as a result of the work done.