This study examined whether active or passive cooling during intermittent work reduced the heat strain associated with wearing firefighting protective clothing (FPC) and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) in the heat (35 degrees Celsius, 50% relative humidity). Fifteen male Toronto firefighters participated in the heat-stress trials. Subjects walked at 4.5 km.h(-1) with 0% elevation on a...

Wildland firefighters work in unfavourable environments involving both heat and moisture. Moisture in clothing systems worn by wildland firefighters may increase or decrease heat transfer, depending on its source and location in the clothing system, location on the body, timing of application and degree of sorption. In this experiment, 4 outerwear/underwear combinations were exposed to 1 of 5 d...

Electrocardiography (ECG) is an ubiquitous vital sign health monitoring method used in the modern healthcare systems. Different designs of ECG system have been developed as alternatives to the common twelve-lead ECG systems. The recent approaches of the ECG system are focusing on the signal quality, portability and power consumption. In this work, an ECG sensing system is developed with capacit...

Contamination of food and individuals by food workers has been identified as an important contributing factor during foodborne illness investigations. Physical and chemical barriers to prevent microbial contamination of food are hurdles that block or reduce the transfer of pathogens to the food surface from the hands of a food worker, from other foods, or from the environment. In food service o...

Clothing shopping systems are widely spread on the World Wide Web (WWW). However, without guaranteeing that these online systems are convenient for the average user, it is difficult for THE "online" businesses to gain the user’s trust and it's also intricate for them to build a wide range of clientele. Therefore, we propose a solution, a web-based clothing shopping system call The Smart Shoppin...

Adequate heat balance is critical to human performance in the heat. If heat balance cannot be maintained, the core temperature increases and body water dehydration leads to exhaustion and limit the performance. Clothing heat transfer properties, thermal insulation and water vapour resistance, modify heat exchange and may indirectly affect performance. Work in protective clothing quickly becomes...

The high level of protection required by personal protective clothing (PPC) severely impedes heat exchange by sweat evaporation. As a result work associated with wearing PPC, particularly in hot environments, implies considerable physiological strain and may render workers exhausted in a short time. Recent development of algorithms for describing the heat transfer, accounting for pumping and wi...

In this work we propose a new framework for extracting deformable clothing items from images by using a three stage global-local fitting procedure. First, a set of initial segmentation templates are generated from a handcrafted database. Then, each template initiates an object extraction process by a global alignment of the model, followed by a local search minimizing a measure of the misfit wi...

In video-surveillance, person reidentification is the task of recognising whether an individual has already been observed over a network of cameras. Typically, this is achieved by exploiting the clothing appearance, as classical biometric traits like the face are impractical in real-world video surveillance scenarios. Clothing appearance is represented by means of low-level local and/or global ...