Touch­screen for fire trucks

Autokaross in Flo­by builds cus­tomized res­cue vehi­cles equipped with the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy. Vehi­cles used by sat­is­fied cus­tomers through­out the Nordic region. Repub­lic, togeth­er with the com­pa­ny Mar­tins­son Elek­tron­ik, has devel­oped a mod­ern con­trol pan­el with touch­screen tech­nol­o­gy to con­trol things in a fire truck such as pump motor, water sup­ply, extra light­ing, etc. 

Pre­vi­ous­ly, this was han­dled by a con­trol pan­el with phys­i­cal but­tons at the back of the vehi­cle. With a mod­ern screen-based solu­tion, new oppor­tu­ni­ties were opened to sim­pli­fy process­es and pro­vide a bet­ter overview of stress­ful sit­u­a­tions and gave Autokaross the oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer new addi­tion­al ser­vices, such as sup­port for help func­tions, diag­nos­tics of cur­rent data, etc

A first step in the project was to cat­e­go­rize the menu choic­es so that it became a so-called event-based sys­tem. This meant that the first choice the fire­fight­er makes is to choose the type of mis­sion, e.g. whether it is a res­cue or fire mis­sion. After that, only the func­tions you need to access dur­ing the cur­rent assign­ment are shown. This pro­vides a faster, clear­er and more intu­itive user inter­face, which is much appre­ci­at­ed in a work sit­u­a­tion where every sec­ond can be crit­i­cal. It was also very impor­tant to keep the inter­face extra clear and taste­ful as it is a work­ing tool that will be locat­ed in smoke and dust and often nav­i­gat­ed with gloves.

An ear­ly idea was to always dis­play crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion at one and the same place regard­less of assign­ment nature, in this case the pres­sure before and after the pump­ing, the num­ber of liters of water in the tank, the amount of foam liq­uid, etc. 

When it comes to warn­ings of var­i­ous kinds, we were asked to retrieve inspi­ra­ton from an air­craft cock­pit where the sys­tem at mul­ti­ple warn­ings makes an auto­mat­ic choice where less crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion is sup­pressed in order to min­i­mize stress and high­light the most impor­tant prob­lem for the moment.

The sys­tem has been well received in the mar­ket and our hope is that it will facil­i­tate fire­fight­ers’ lives and that Autokaross will con­tin­ue to lead the devel­op­ment with a good result where every­one in the com­mu­ni­ty ben­e­fits from a safe and effi­cient res­cue service.