Designing smart garment for firefighters

Nowadays, developing technology is used to improve the quality of human life. Protection of people against the physical, chemical and biological dangers becomes more efficient with developed technology. The majority of the effect of this protection is provided with textile products, especially with protective clothing.Firefighters are occupational group; most exposed to thermal environment. Therefore, fire-fighters must wear thermal cut-and abrasion-resistant protective clothing, providing very good heat and flame protection. When firefighters exposure in the long term or repeated to high temperatures, protective clothing may cause burn injuries. If the ambient temperature rises to a certain point to ensure thermal equilibrium, sweating of the firefighter is accelerating. However, the firefighter feels good during sweating at a very high temperature, hence he can?t recognized, when he must move away from the fire environment. Wet clothes have greater heat transfer rate than dry clothes. The remaining sweat vapour, it can not be expelled out of the clothes, cause burns.In recent years, with joint works of textile and electronic sciences, thanks to the electronic detection systems as temperature, humidity, ECG, CO2, CO sensors, they are placed in layers of clothing, burns, poisoning, shock etc. diseases that may occur on the body of fire-fighters can be prevented and control the health care.In this study, control and protection of health status for the firefighter was targeted. A smart firefighter jacket was designed, predicting the critical skin temperature and ambient temperature changes; increasing the visibility of firefighter in a smoky environment. For this purpose, sensors and connection components were used; an electronic circuit background was created and following it was integrated to the firefighter jacket.