IBM has announced the winner of an international competition that sought disaster response technologies from across industry and academia. Prometeo, winner of the Call for Code 2019 Global Challenge, is an artificial intelligence system that works to protect firefighters during operations, IBM said Saturday. The arm-strapped, smartphone-sized device measures external factors that affect firefighters, such as smoke concentration, humidity and temperature. The system then links with IBM's Cloud Internet of Things platform and a machine learning model to help command centers monitor firefighter health in real time. Software developers, a nurse and a firefighter compose the Barcelona-based team that produced Prometeo.

IBM today announced the 2019 Call for Code grand prize was awarded to Prometeo for developing a health monitoring platform for firefighters. The Barcelona-based team consisting of a nurse, a firefighter, and three developers will receive $200,000 and assistance from IBM and its partners to bring the project to life. TNW's finance, blockchain, and business event is coming up soon Promoteo began as an endeavor by firefighter Joan Herrera. Realizing there were no systems in place to monitor the health of firefighters combating wildfires, Herrera and nurse Vicenç Padró began collecting data by hand. Eventually, they joined forces with three IT professionals, Salomé Valero, Josep Ràfols, and Marco Rodriguez, and the team joined the Call For Code challenge.

AsTeR (Europe) – During natural disasters, emergency call centers are overwhelmed and lack the human resources to deal with the sudden uptick in calls. Project AsTeR helps prioritize these calls based on their level of emergency. Instead of being directly connected to an operator, victims are asked to briefly explain their emergency over the phone. Their responses are then converted to text and analyzed to extract key information, such as the number of victims, type of emergency and location. AsTeR then provides first responders with a map identifying areas with high levels of emergency based on the number of people involved and the type of injuries.