BrickThru enables firefighters to save more lives

When firefighters arrive on the scene of a fire, they often have only seconds to decide where to focus their attention to save the most lives. Visibility may be low and they may not have enough information about who is in a building or where they are located. How could technology be applied to help these everyday heroes make better split-second decisions?

The Call for Code Honoring Everyday Heroes Challenge asked participants to develop new technology solutions to address challenges faced by first responders, delivery personnel, childcare workers, healthcare frontline workers, educators, and many more who have been invaluable to society during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology solutions would need to run on a Samsung tablet, smartphone, and/or wearable device and use IBM open hybrid cloud technologies such as IBM Cloud and IBM Watson. Participants also had access to Samsung toolkits, as well as data from The Weather Company. Teams had four weeks to create promising, innovative new solutions that can be nurtured, improved, and put to work through the Call for Code incubation framework with IBM and Samsung Electronics.

Hear Samsung leaders talk about what they looked for in Call for Code Honoring Everyday Heroes Challenge submissions.

Call for Code is thrilled to announce the winner of the Honoring Everyday Heroes Challenge: BrickThru.

In their research, the BrickThru team from German University in Cairo, Egypt found that wifi signals are everywhere around us and can be used to detect humans and their different activities like walking or falling. Their mobile app solution, designed to take advantage of Samsung hardware, uses wifi-sensing technology to locate people, and applies filters to remove unwanted environmental interferences. IBM Machine Learning allowed the team to train the app to detect human movements as minor as breathing. This could allow a fire captain for example to scan a building and visualize the distribution of people inside. The app’s live dashboard then updates in real time to identify the number of people located in every area and the nearest firefighters to rescue them. This data helps the captain rapidly allocate help where it’s needed the most. The app can also track firefighter health metrics through Samsung smartwatches and can notify the captain if issues are detected. Reports after the fire event help the firefighters analyze their performance as well.

Watch a demo of the BrickThru solution.

As the winner of the challenge, the BrickThru team will receive $15,000 USD, a Galaxy Z Fold3 for each team member, and deployment support from IBM and Samsung through Call for Code.

Call for Code invites developers and problem solvers around the world to build and contribute to sustainable, open source technology projects that address social and humanitarian issues, while ensuring the top solutions are deployed to make a demonstrable difference.

Join the Call for Code Community to get involved.