Tanagram Partners is (or was, I should say) a high-tech company based in Chicago, dedicated to innovating, designing, and building human computer interactions for products you use everyday. Recently the company has been forced to file for chapter 7 bankruptcy, however, in its final years Tanagram’s President and CEO, Joseph Juhnke, was on the path to developing something that would forever change the fire fighting industry.
It’s called the Augmented Reality SCBA Mask and it hasn’t gone down with its ship. In other words, this technology (although envisioned and developed with Tanagram Partners) has been carried on to NovemberKiloEcho, or NKE, Inc.
NKE, Inc. is another technology-based company founded by Joseph Juhnke (the past President and CEO of Tanagram, Inc.) who conducts their research and development of products under government grants – the company will continue to develop the Augmented Realtiy Mask.
The mask itself, originally designed and created by Joeseph Juhnke, uses augmented reality or synthetic vision to display information to firefighers through their SBCA mask. Augmented reality is the same technology used in broadcasts of NCAA college football or NFL games, for example – whenever the yellow first-down marker is displayed upon your TV screen.
The mask shows firefighters a number of different advantageous pieces of information including oxygen levels and how much time remains based on tank pressure and respiratory rate; the temperature and trend of the surrounding environment; exit paths and nearest egress points; breadcrumb paths of what steps the firefighter has taken; the location of all other firefighters on scene; a thermal imaging overlay option triggered by a gesture interface; your personal vitals; battery life of your radio; the visuals of other team members; and virtually any other related factor imaginable!
As you can also imagine, however, this technology is not cheap and costs somewhere in the ballpark of $5,000 per mask. Yet, hopefully sometime in the near future (as depicted in the below video), this innovation will be standardized throughout departments nationwide.
For more extensive information regarding this amazing development, click here.
Photo & Video Credit: Joeseph Juhnke – Nke, Inc.
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