As Real As It Gets: A new type of firefighter suit that is disrupting the industry

Smoke, noise, disorientation— when firefighters are inside a burning building, the ability to get out safely is a challenge.

In this episode, we speak with Michael Stanfield, a former Toronto fire chief and co-founder of IFTech, and Alex Ferworn, Director of the Computational Public Safety Lab at TMU, about the “As Real as It Gets” suit, which utilizes virtual reality video game technology into potentially  life-saving technology for firefighters. 

Transcript

Amanda Cupido: This is The Forefront, a Toronto Metropolitan University podcast that explores ideas for cities. I’m Amanda Cupido. 

So here’s the problem: firefighters can be under some serious stress when they answer a call. And sometimes that stress can lead to accidents or injuries that could have been avoided. 

In Ontario, fire-related deaths jumped 63% in 2020. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, fatalities among firefighters went up 18% between 2012 and 2021. The causes of those deaths included things like overexertion, being struck by debris, and getting lost or disoriented at the scene:

Firespotlight Excerpt: If I’m trying to search for a PASS (Personal Alert Safety System), alarm, how disorientating can that be? Pretty disorientating, right? It can sound like it’s over there, but it’s really over there. So if I need to change direction when whatever happens, I can’t let this rope slack down and walk over, it knots up. So I need to keep it taut. So our method for that is “bite” (then) “pull.” We trace the line—bite. Trace the line—drop. Trace the line—bite, trace the line—drop. That way, when I’m ready to change directions, it deploys right back out.

Amanda Cupido: That’s from an instructional video from Firespotlight.com for rapid intervention teams who need to know how to navigate a smoke-filled room. The firefighter is showing his team how to use a rope held at hip height to track their way back out.

But when firefighters answer a call, they have to keep track of all kinds of information: the strength of the fire, the people in danger, the layout of the place they’re navigating, and their own safety. That’s a lot for anyone to take in, even for someone with training.

It’s something that Alex Ferworn has been thinking about.

Alex Ferworn: So suppose you’re a firefighter and you’re fighting a house fire. So you arrive in your truck and they send you in. And so, you know, fires cause structural damage. Now it becomes unsafe for you to be in that house or in the location in the house. So you now must find a way of exiting the house.

So the idea was that you don’t fight fires alone, you fight fires in teams of firefighters, and some of those firefighters will be safe when other firefighters might be in jeopardy. So there should be a way of knowing where each firefighter is and sharing information so that you might create a clear path to safety.

Amanda Cupido: Alex is the director and founder of the Computational Public Safety Lab, or CPSL, at Toronto Metropolitan University. The lab applies algorithms, simulations, and technologies to real world issues.  

Alex Ferworn: If you apply computational thinking to defined problems in other domains, like public safety, there’s this notion we have that we can improve those processes.

Amanda Cupido: So in this case, Alex tapped into one of his former students, who was working with an Ontario-based company developing new technology.

Alex Ferworn: He had been dealing with this company, IFTech, which produced this suit called ARAIG, and I didn’t know what it stood for, but it stands for “as real as it gets.” 

Amanda Cupido: That’s spelled A-R-A-I-G. It’s a type of device called a haptic suit. “Haptic” just means that it’s a computing system that provides physical feedback to the user. Think of the little vibrations you might feel when you swipe to unlock your phone, or press down to move an app on your homescreen. That’s haptic feedback.

But what ARAIG does is a little more intense than that. Before we get to some examples, let me tell you the backstory. It all started in the world of first-person video games.

Michael Stanfield: There’s that disconnect between what you see and what you actually feel. 

Amanda Cupido: That’s Michael Stanfield. 

Michael Stanfield: Because you’re in an environment, and if somebody reaches out and is supposed to grab you, should you not feel that?

Amanda Cupido: He’s the founder and COO of IFTech.

Michael Stanfield: The idea of feeling what you’re exactly supposed to feel at that time in real time.

Amanda Cupido: He started working on creating the ARAIG suit back in 2007 with his son, Brodie. 

Michael Stanfield: We were literally sitting on the couch. He had just graduated high school and was going into university and he was going into gaming and entrepreneurship. We’re playing as a team. He’s driving this kind of jeep. I’m on the back with a machine gun, and there’s an alien that comes out and fires a grenade at us and grenade launcher at us, and it blows up the vehicle we’re in and we go flying off the jeep. Now, again, that’s our characters, right. And it’s like, wow, it’s great visuals! But the only thing that we felt was that little rumble in the handheld controller. It’s like we looked at each other and said, there’s got to be something more.

Amanda Cupido: So Michael and Brodie went into their basement and started working on a prototype. The original was a motorcycle vest with devices attached to it. But over time, the idea grew. 

Michael and Brodie created their business, IFTech, and started hiring engineers and looking for funding. Eventually, it became clear that this technology they were working on could be used for more than just gaming.

Michael Stanfield: When we presented our product, the technology itself, to different groups and different people, they were telling us what it could be used for. It was interesting because you get in a room of people and they go, “Hey, have you ever thought of this? Hey, have you ever thought of that? Have you ever?” It’s like, write it down!

Amanda Cupido: In 2018, the team from CPSL pitched Michael and Brodie on an idea: could the ARAIG suit be used to help firefighters navigate out of dangerous situations?

The concept appealed to Michael, and for good reason—he was a firefighter for over 30 years. 

Michael Stanfield: When it comes to the fire service and any other service like police, military, EMS, we’re under duress when we’re actually performing. When we get nervous, you know, sometimes we lose our train of thought or it just we shake a little bit or whatever these feelings that we get that don’t allow us to perform at our optimum. With the fire service and all, it’s like, okay, there’s got to be a way that this can be used.

Amanda Cupido: So here’s how it works. It starts with the idea that you heard Alex talk about before—using technology to communicate the location of different firefighters in a dangerous environment. 

Here’s Alex again.

Alex Ferworn: Well, it turns out that basically everybody’s buying phones that have LIDAR systems on them. So if you buy an iPhone or an Android device, chances are you’ll get this high powered camera that does quite a lot of sensing. Many people don’t use it for much, but it turns out that you can actually record paths as you travel.

Amanda Cupido: So the phones communicate with each other, recording the paths that every firefighter walks as they navigate the environment. This creates a map of which parts of the area are safe and unsafe. That’s when the ARAIG suit comes in. When the firefighter needs to find a way out of a situation, ARAIG will use the map to literally push them in the right direction.

Let’s say you’re a firefighter and you’re at the scene. You run into a burning building with your oxygen tank, which lasts about 30 minutes. Twenty minutes later, you’re deep inside the building, surrounded by fire and falling debris. You can barely see anything because of the smoke. But you’re wearing your ARAIG suit.

I’ll let Michael take it from here. 

Michael Stanfield: So what our product does is it actually moves you or pulls you and alerts you to the direction that you’re supposed to go. It can also cause you to move or bend or move into a crawling position or, you know, push you to stand up. So it gives you the cues for not only what direction to go in, but can also give you cues to body position. It’s already mapped where you’ve been, which is most likely the safest. If there’s anything there, you’ve gone around certain things, you’ve gone under certain things. It’s like somebody holding your hand almost.

Amanda Cupido: ARAIG uses two kinds of haptic feedback: vibrations and electrical muscle stimulation. So as the firefighter is navigating the area, they might feel a vibration on their left side, so that they know to turn left, or a pulling sensation that indicates they should crouch down. And it can do this on its own.

Michael Stanfield: You just put it on and you go, and it doesn’t like you don’t have to. You don’t need a GPS system. You don’t need an outside computer. It doesn’t need to be monitored by anything. You put it on, you do it, you go in, you need to get out. If you have to yourself, press the button, you press the button, and then it will take you the shortest distance from the map that was created. It will take you the shortest distance and the fastest route out.

Amanda Cupido: ARAIG has the potential to eliminate part of the human error that might come from stress or disorientation, which in turn could save a lot of lives. On top of that, Alex hopes that it could make fire safety more accessible for communities beyond major urban centres. 

Alex Ferworn: The problem with fire is it’s hot and it’s dangerous, and, well, I said the common off the shelf components—it would be cool to see common off the shelf components used for something that is often specialty, very expensive specialty gear. So it might be, you know, fine for a city like New York, which has multiple helicopters available and all kinds of technologies because they have a huge tax base. But that should also, that safety, that notion of safety should also be available to the much smaller towns who don’t have the resources.

Amanda Cupido: While many tools for firefighters rely on specialty computers, ARAIG isn’t like that. The system that the CPSL is working on relies on something you  might have in your hands right now: a smartphone. 

Alex Ferworn: It’s hard to get some of these specialized suits or radios and things that manufacturers create specifically for firefighters. But it’s not so hard to walk into the Apple Store and buy an iPhone. And so we want to kind of democratize and make it much cheaper to provide safety for all.

Amanda Cupido: And beyond that, Alex hopes that his team’s research will eventually lead to a world where human beings don’t have to put themselves in harm’s way at all.

Alex Ferworn: So the dream is that eventually part of the dangerous functionality of responding to disasters will be done by machines.

Amanda Cupido: Before we go, here’s Alex one more time on what’s so special about TMU.

Alex Ferworn: TMU is innovative. You have many ideas, strange ideas—ideas that won’t work if you have many of them in succession, and some of them will stick. And, what I found here, here at this university is they allow for that. So that is kind of the way we think. There are lots of people worried about real problems affecting real people. And those people need help. And, we’re at least aiming at trying to help them. So that’s why it’s a great place to both research and work. And, I know from our graduates we have had significant impact in a number of areas. Simply because we produce competent individuals able to work within our society, try to make it better rather than for some theoretical goal.

Amanda Cupido: This podcast was created for alumni and friends by University Advancement at Toronto Metropolitan University. Special thanks to our guests on today’s episode: Alex Ferworn and Michael Stanfield. This podcast was produced by me, Amanda Cupido, and Emily Morantz. Katia Galati was the editor for the show—and we’re all proud grads of TMU! The support team from the university includes Betty Quan, Haweya Fadal, Meredith Jordan, and Krishan Mehta. To learn more about the Computational Public Safety Lab, and for more episodes of this podcast and others, visit torontomu.ca/alumni/podcasts.