Fire Information and Rescue Equipment (FIRE) is a project with the Chicago Fire Department (CFD) at UC Berkeley’s Mechanical Engineering department.  Firefighting can be an extremely demanding and chaotic environment in which one must make quick decisions on little information and divide attention between many immediate events, making it difficult to efficiently and accurately complete critical tasks such as building search and rescue.  The FIRE project is addressing these challenges by applying and designing new technologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and small head-mounted displays (HMDs) for firefighting, and conducting experiments and exploratory research with firefighters.  We aim to design, prototype, and implement information and communication enhancing tools for firefighters to improve the safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of emergency responses.  The project is focused toward large urban, commercial, and industrial building incidents such as high-rises and warehouses. More