Comparing Standard and State-of-the-art Firefighter Coats on Postural Balance and Gait in a Live Burn Environment

More than one million firefighters work in the United States. The standard fire (SF) coat, used by the firefighters, had been in place for many years. Our research team was entrusted with the job of designing a new coat radically different from the SF coat. In the first year of the project, we designed a cooling system (CS) coat with carbon nanotube-based fabric, two pouches inside the coat, accommodating coolants and fans. We spent one year on the new coat making sure that fans run, and coolants remain unspent while firefighters work inside a live burn facility for a specified length of time. We christened the state-of-theart coat that eventually involved as Lion’s cooling system (LC) coat. The main objective of our research was to compare SF and LC coats on gait and postural balance of firefighters. Underlying our research mission was the goal to show that the LC coat is not inferior to the SF coat on gait and postural balance. The mission was successful.