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A unique positioning technology POINTER is being developed to pinpoint firefighters inside buildings where other positioning technologies fail.

"Even with all of the advances made in firefighting technology, we still lose far too many firefighters each year," said Greg Price who leads S&T's first responder research-and-development programs. "We want them to know that we have their backs, that we are working to give them the tools they need to ensure their own safety. POINTER is one of those life-saving solutions."

Unlike positioning technologies such as GPS or radio-frequency identification, POINTER doesn't use radio waves. Though radio waves offer a reliable means to determine your location in a relatively open space, they can become unpredictable if you go indoors or find yourself surrounded by high buildings. This may be minor annoyance when trying to find the location of an appointment, but it could be a life-or-death situation when trying to locate firefighters in a burning building.

The POINTER system is composed of three parts: a receiver, transmitter, and base station. The firefighter wears the receiver, which is currently the size of a cellphone but expected to become much smaller after further development. A transmitter that can be attached to emergency vehicles outside the building generates the MQS fields, which travel through the building, pinging any receivers located inside over range of about 230 feet (70 meters) in the current version of the system. This range can be extended but isn't needed in most fire-service applications. The receivers detect the fields determine their 3D location, and then send that data back outside the building to a laptop (the base station). Visualization software shows where the firefighters are in 3D space within an accuracy of a few inches. Not only can POINTER help firefighting teams locate team members through walls, MOS fields can also determine the orientation of the receiver.

"This is a very exciting technology that adds another dimension to firefighters' situational awareness," said JPL's Ed Chow, the POINTER program manager, "Firefighters can be tracked in real time and, if they become unresponsive, their team members can see if they are trapped under debris or if they are injured so a rescue can be mounted."

The POINTER team is now planning to carry out a live webcast of a technical demonstration inside a two-level single-family home in Pasadena, California, near the campus of Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. Further field tests in a variety of firefighting scenarios are being planned through 2021, and a commercial version of POINTER will be made available to fire departments in 2022.