Information Systems Laboratories Inc. is designing a system to track the movements of each firefighter and provide data on their health and equipment, which would be relayed to a fire commander or fellow firefighters at the scene. The San Diego company has dubbed the system the Wireless Firefighter Lifeline and was recently awarded a $100,000 grant by the National Science Foundation to develop it.

Standard location technology such as global positioning systems often can't operate in large buildings where signals from transmitters are scrambled and frequently can't pin down firefighter locations to within a single meter, says J. Doss Halsey, the Information Systems VP who hatched the idea of the Lifeline.

To beat signal scattering, the lab is working on a system that works at a lower frequency but uses a higher-power band to penetrate obstacles.

When firefighters arrive at a blaze, they would set up a mobile LAN, putting receivers on their vehicles or at the corners of buildings and wearing tiny transmitters, Halsey says. The lab's system also would send information such as biometric data, including heart and respiration rates, as well as data on air-bottle levels, external temperatures, and carbon dioxide levels.