VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY Phạm Văn Thành DEVELOPMENT OF A REAL-TIME SUPPORTED SYSTEM FOR FIREFIGHTERS ON-DUTY MASTER’S THESIS IN ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING Hanoi - 2016 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY Phạm Văn Thành DEVELOPMENT OF A REAL-TIME SUPPORTED SYSTEM FOR FIREFIGHTERS ON-DUTY Field: Electronics and Communications Engineering Major: Electronic Engineering Code: 60520203 MASTER’S THESIS IN ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: Assoc. Trần Đức Tân Hanoi - 2016 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com AUTHORSHIP I hereby declare that the work contained in this thesis is of my own and has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no materials previously published or written by another person except where due reference or acknowledgement is made. Author Student Phạm Văn Thành i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my sincere thanks to my advisor Assoc.
Tran Duc-Tan, the professional of Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunication, University of Engineering and Technology – Vietnam National University, Hanoi for the guidance and support given to me throughout the thesis. Special thanks to the lecturers of Faculty of Electronic and Communication for their help and guidance me in all thesis process. Thanks for all members of the MEMS Lab for their help and discussed conversations. At the end, I would like to thank my parents, my relatives and my friends because their comfort and supporting are the power for me going to success.
Sincerely Pham Van Thanh ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS AUTHORSHIP. v List of Figures. vi List of Tables. ix List of Abbreviations.
Overview about Firefighters. The research objectives. The role of fall detection system. The available supporting systems for Firefighters.
3 BACKGROUND AND HARDWARE DESIGN. ADXL345 accelerometers sensor. MQ7 CO sensor. Masters and Slaves.
The I2C Physical Protocol. The I2C Software Protocol. Reading from the Slave. 16 iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.
The Asynchronous Receiving and Transmitting Protocol. The integrated system. The 3-DOF accelerometer. Model of fall data processing.
The fall detection algorithms. Posture Recognition Module. Cascade Posture Recognition. Fall Detection Module.
CO Detection Module. 31 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS. Experimental setup and testing. The evaluation with other public datasets.
45 LIST OF AUTHOR’S PUBLICATIONS. 47 iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Abstract The firefighters can be injured by unintentional falls during the implementation tasks because of the broken in floors, structure elements; gas bombs; liquid boil ejection and toxic gases… in a fire. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a portable and efficient device to monitor the falls by integrating a micro controller, a 3-DOF (Degrees of Freedom) accelerometer sensor, a MQ7 sensor (Semiconductor Sensor for Carbon Monoxide), a GSM/GPRS (Group Special Mobile/General packet radio service) modem, and the corresponding embedded fall detection algorithms. By developing algorithms and the corresponding simulations to monitor the fall event which can distinguish between being fall and the other daily activities (ADLs) such as standing, walking, running, sitting, lying.
The signals from accelerometer are sent to the micro controller to monitor and alert the fall events. The cascade posture recognition is proposed to enhance the fall detection accuracy by determining if the posture is a result of a fall. Furthermore, MQ7 sensor is integrated into the proposed system to confirm the fall directly in emergency situations when air supporting device is working in failure. Based on the detection results, if a person falls with faint, an alert message will be sent to their leader via the GSM/GPRS modem.
We had carefully investigated the threshold values (to determine the fall events) and the window size(to determine the time frame for analyzing) by MATLAB. After that, we selected the most suitable values for these parameters to achieve the optimal performance when it is working in emergency places. Keywords: Firefighters, Acceleration, Fall detection, Posture recognitions, CO detection, Threshold investigations. v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com List of Figures Figure 1-1– US Firefighter injuries by type of duty during 2014 [1].
1 Figure 1-2– Firefighter injury on-duty [5]. 2 Figure 1-3– Personal alert safety system (PASS) devices from various manufacturers [6]. 4 Figure 2-1– PIC18f 4520 pins [30]. 6 Figure 2-2– The structure of PIC18f 4520 [30].
7 Figure 2-3– ADXL345 Digital Accelerometer. 8 Figure 2-4– The functional block diagram of ADXL345 [31]. 9 Figure 2-5– The axis of ADXL345 Accelerometer [31]. 9 Figure 2-6– The positions and output responses [31].
10 Figure 2-7– The SIM900 Module [34]. 10 Figure 2-8– The CO sensor [36]. 12 Figure 2-9– I2C connection diagram [37]. 13 Figure 2-10– The physical I2C bus [32].
13 Figure 2-11– Start and stop sequences [32]. 14 Figure 2-12– Communication between two devices [33]. 17 Figure 2-13– Basic UART packet form: 1 start bit, 8 data bits, 1 parity and 1 stop bit [33]. 18 Figure 2-14– The connected modules in the proposed system.
19 Figure 3-1– Position of the 3-DOF accelerometer in waist body. 23 Figure 3-2– Fall data processing for fall detection system. 24 Figure 3-3– The summary of fall detection system. 24 vi TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Figure 3-4– The proposed algorithms of fall detection.
25 Figure 3-5– Flow chart of posture recognition. 26 Figure 3-6– Illustration of two threshold th1 and th2 [39]. 26 Figure 3-7– Ay acceleration vs. 27 Figure 3-8– Fall detection module.
28 Figure 3-9– L2 acceleration pattern of a fall sample [9]. 29 Figure 3-10– CO detection algorithm. 29 Figure 3-11– CO sensor location. 31 Figure 3-12– Fall decision using fall detection combined cascade posture recognitions and CO alert level.
32 Figure 4-1– The author testing and measuring the CO level in the fire. 34 Figure 4-2– The CO level in the fire. 35 Figure 4-3– CO levels between clean and smoke environments. 36 Figure 4-5– Standing posture.
37 Figure 4-7– Walking posture. 37 Figure 4-8– Standing and sitting. 37 Figure 4-9– Recognition detection of standing and sitting. 38 Figure 4-10– Fall detection with the window size of 10 samples and threshold th4 = 1.
39 Figure 4-11– Fall detection with the window size of 20 samples and threshold th4 = 1. 39 Figure 4-12– Fall detection with the window size of 30 samples and threshold th4 = 1. 39 vii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Figure 4-13– Fall decision without cascade posture recognitions [39]. 40 Figure 4-14– Fall decision with cascade posture recognitions [39].
40 viii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com List of Tables Table 1: The Pic18f4520 features [30]. 6 Table 2: The technical data of MQ7 [35]. 12 Table 3: Assigned Values for Different Postures [38]. 27 Table 4: Carbon Monoxide Concentrations, COHb Levels, and Associated Symptoms [11].
30 Table 5: Final Decision of Fall using Cascade Posture Cognition. 33 Table 6: Features of the public and our recorded fall detection datasets. 41 Table 7: The result of applying our algorithms to detect the fall events on other exiting datasets. 44 ix TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com List of Abbreviations ADLs Daily activities CCS Cascading Style CO Carbonmonioxide DOF Degree Of Freedom GPRS General Packet Radio Service I2 C Inter – Integrated Circuit LCD Liquid Crystal Display MCU Microcontroller Unit PASS Personal Alert Safety System SMS Short Message Service SPI Serial Peripheral Interface UART Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter UFFP University of Firefighting and Prevention ZCR Zero Cross Rate x TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1.
Overview about Firefighters According to [1] there are 63,350 US firefighter injuries in 2014 with 27,015 occurred in fireground operations and a total of 64 firefighters died on- duty at the same year [4]. US Firefighter injuries by type of duty during 2014 Non-Fire emergency 6% Fire ground (fall, slip, jump 23% 17% (28.7%) and overexertion, strain (25.0%)) 11% Training 43% Other duty Responding or returning from an incident Figure 1-1– US Firefighter injuries by type of duty during 2014 [1] 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com In Vietnam, there are thousand of fires burning every year such as: 2357 and 2792 in 2014 and 2015 respectively [2] [3]. This is an alarm signal to alert about unsafely for firefighters in both US, Vietnam and in worldwide because they always are working and facing with a lot of dangers while they still have not enough and suitable supporting systems to protect their lives such as the fall detection systems in order to help them to escape from the dangerous situations. Figure 1-2– Firefighter injury on-duty [5] 1.
The research objectives Based on the actual problem, this thesis mainly focus on improving the fall detection algorithms to distinguish between being fall and other activities of firefighters on-duty combined with CO level measurement to prevent the death because of the broken in floors, structure elements; gas bombs; liquid boil ejection and toxic gases and broken in air supporting devices. 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. The role of fall detection system Fall detection system plays very essential role to support Firefighters on- duty to avoid the death because of the heat, smoke as others dangerous problems which can be appreared in a fire as discussed above or any other situations. When facing with the death if they donot have enough and siutable supporting systems, it will effect directly to their lives.
Hence, the thesis mainly focus on proposed a system that can detect the fall events and CO threshold level as well as, and send out the message content to their leader and relative member for the help. The proposed system can distinguish between being fall and others daily as on-duty activities of firefighters as running, walking, sitting, jumping,. in actual recorded data. Furthermore, most of firefighters and pedestrians were died by toxic smokes, CO is one of the most dangerous gas with the name “silent killer” and the process to find out the danger CO value in a fire is extremly important to protect the health, lives of firefighters.
The available supporting systems for Firefighters There are several published methods used to detect the fall events in recent year such as: image processing [7], location sensors [8], smart phones and accelerometers [9][10]…but the reported publications were only used for the elderly and patients in clean air environments with long time to confirm self-stand up ability. Therefore, it is not suitable for firefighter’s activities in the fire environment conditions. The department of Homeland Security also was developed a Personal alert safety system (PASS) [6] devices to equip for firefighters to detect high heat and smoke of a fire. PASS devices are designed to signal for aid via an audible alarm signal if a fire fighter becomes incapacitated on the fire ground.
Furthermore, it can sense movement or lack of movement and activate a 95 decibel alarm if lack of motion exceeds a specific time period. Nevertheless, in a real fire situation, there are variety of noise like people voice; the operation of fire protection systems, fire truck, fire pumpes.Therefore, audible alarm signal is not useful in a big fire burning. 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Figure 1-3– Personal alert safety system (PASS) devices from various manufacturers [6] Based on the above limitations, this paper proposed to develop a real- time, low cost and high accuracy system which uses a 3-DOF accelerometer, MQ7 CO sensor combined with development the algorithms and the corresponding simulation process to monitor the fall events, which can be distinguished between fall and ADLs. It’s good for the fire environment and firefighters activities.