This new open-source firefighter safety project will save lives — and you can help

AI platform Prometeo, the team that won the 2019 Call for Code challenge, launched its open-source Pyrrha solution in partnership with IBM, Samsung, and The Linux Foundation. This is going to save lives.

Up front: Pyrrha is an open-source solution developed by a team comprised of a firefighter, a nurse, and a group of developers. It gives commanders in the field the ability to monitor personnel safety at a glance.

This starts by equipping firefighters with a wearable device that detects toxins.

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Per a post on the IBM developer blog:

The values from the device are collected and transmitted over the network to an IoT platform, where the data is processed by an IBM Watson-based machine learning model. This model distills the information into a simple color-coded status on the Prometeo dashboard that the fire command center can use to monitor the health of firefighters and pull them from the field if their health is in danger.

Background: Prometeo’s been developing its solution since the 2019 Call for Code challenge. In the time since, the team’s improved many facets of the technology including the development of updated hardware and advanced software through the team’s partnership with IBM.

The cool thing is that this is an open-source solution. It’s being hosted by the Linux Foundation, and all the companies and teams involved want everybody’s help making Pyrrha better.

Per a press release from The Linux Foundation:

The Pyrrha project community encourages new users to contribute and to deploy the software in new environments around the world. Priorities for short term updates include adapting the hardware for usage in new locations, improving the analysis of toxin exposure over time, and further improving the mobile and smartphone capabilities.

Quick take: This is awesome. Firefighters are heroes. Anything that helps them helps all of us.

If you’d like to get involved — whether you’re a developer, a potential tester, or someone who’s looking to learn about open-source software, AI-based solutions, and real-world implementations — visit IBM’s open-source community site here.