Bespoke specialist software development for Dräger
- Revolutionising firefighter safety and management through technology.
- Raising mission efficiency, effectiveness, and safety.
- Advanced reporting for improved accountability.
INTRODUCTION
Dräger is an international engineering company that manufactures medical and safety technology products. They’ve been a pioneering force in the field since they were founded in 1889 and continue to steer innovation today, protecting and saving lives in over 190 countries.
Enigma has worked closely with Dräger for the last decade. Since 2020, we’ve been supporting their engineering teams with the creation of an innovative new incident command system.
The Dräger FireGround Accountability System aims to make the management of fire incidents safer and more effective by minimising the need for voice communications, enabling the remote monitoring of incidents, and facilitating better reporting
WHAT THEY SAY
“Enigma consistently deliver a high quality product on time and to specification. We really value their input as an app development partner, to complement our core competencies. Their experience and advice has been invaluable in creating a solution for our customers.”
The Challenge
Effective communication plays a critical role in ensuring firefighter safety during a fire incident. Much of this communication, is conducted via radio, relying on timely updates between the firefighters on scene and their incident commander. These manual communications can be hard to manage and keep track of, and make it difficult to review an incident after it’s happened.
Dräger set out to enhance their existing safety equipment with an advanced telemetry system that automates a large number of these critical communications, making it easier and quicker for an incident commander to:
- See which firefighters are at an incident.
- See how much pressure (air) a firefighter has left in their breathing apparatus.
- See whether the firefighter has indicated a state of distress.
- Issue a command to evacuate the firefighter.
WHAT WE DID
We developed a tablet application that receives real-time data from Dräger’s equipment and presents it back to incident commanders, helping them to make quicker, more effective decisions.
Research and Development
We worked closely with the Dräger team to understand:
- What information would be available on the telemetry system and how it would be passed between devices.
- How that information would be used in the management of an incident.
- How best to present the information to incident commanders.
- How to record the information for reporting and accountability purposes.
We had close collaboration with Dräger teams in the UK and Germany throughout the project, allowing for the software and hardware to be developed, tested, and iterated in tandem.
Firefighter safety and management
The FireGround tablet app allows an incident manager to:
- See which firefighters are at the incident, and which breathing apparatus they are wearing.
- Sort firefighters into teams.
- Deploy teams to the incident, and record the status of each team.
- Issue an evacuate order to individual firefighters, teams, or the whole squadron.
- View the pressure readings of all firefighters at the incident.
- See alert/distress signals from any of the firefighters at the incident.
- Make notes and take photographs, and store them alongside the incident report.
Strategic management and advanced reporting
To allow for remote oversight and reporting, the app sends regular updates to a cloud-based web application. This can be made available in a control room to provide an overview of multiple concurrent incidents, and aid in the strategic management of fire teams.
Light and dark modes make the app appropriate for use in different lighting and weather conditions. There are also multiple language options available, with more to be added over the course of 2025.
Prototyping and testing
We understood early on that a key challenge of this project would be developing the FireGround software before the hardware was finalised.
To manage this, we worked with Dräger’s engineers to develop an innovative tool that simulates the data from their telemetry systems. This allowed for the app to be developed, tested, and even demoed very early in the lifecycle of the project.
During the development of the new hardware, we worked closely with the Dräger team on and off site to test and refine the product -- ensuring that each element of the hardware and software integration was performing well.
The system has now been tested with Dräger teams all around the world, and we worked in partnership with Dräger to respond to user feedback and fine-tune the app before it was deployed in the field.
THE OUTCOME/RESULTS
An industry-leading technology solution for fire services all over the world.
- The Dräger FireGround Accountability System is rolling out to fire services worldwide in 2025.
- Ongoing, effective collaboration between multiple cross-functional teams, managing different elements of a complex system.
- A strong partnership between Dräger and Enigma Interactive, working closely to create innovative technology solutions.
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