Over the last year we have seen a plethora of performance logging hardware come on market for self-hacking enthusiasts. None of them have (yet) been of life and death importance. A sensor from Equivital bucks that trend: their temperature sensing hardware will save firefighters health and improve the performance of firefighting efforts.

In a trial conducted in Australia, participating firefighters donned a sensor studded chestband, which monitored their heartbeat, respiration and skin temperature. They then swallow the LifeMonitor capsule which communicates body temperature data to the sensor breastplate. Each fireman in the operation is now live on the Equivital software system which is measuring (in real time) their respiration, metabolism and their core body temperature. This last metric is crucial as the firefighter herself is unable to know when they've crossed the heat stress threshold. Once they are in this territory they can succumb to heat stress or dehydration. Managing the firefighting operation from afar is essential.

With the data being streamed live to a central hub the fire fighting overseers can coordinate the unit with unparalleled accuracy: pulling heat stressed firefighters from the fray and redeploying other fighters accordingly. The data from the australian trial has inspired new management strategies. Real time monitoring of body data to prevent the onset of environmental stress makes the utmost sense in firefighting, and perhaps different real time metric crunching could gauge and combat stress that results from different work surroundings.