UMEUS.

Being a firefighter can be really stressful. At one moment you could be eating breakfast with your teammates, and at the next, you could be extinguishing a fire or taking a burnt body out of a building. This is what we learned first-hand in our research with firefighters from different parts of the world (United States, Chile, United Kingdom and China). Firefighting is one of the jobs with the highest rates of mental health problems. PTSD, suicide, and depression are the most common among these workers.

After talking to firefighters we understood that:

1. Firefighting is an inherently stressful job and it might continue to be.

2. Empathizing with firefighters daily struggle and their unpredictable emotional estate is difficult for their families and creates a disconnection.

3. The main source of support for firefighters mental health are partners (family) and colleagues.

So we set up the challenge of using these existing relationships as protective factors to preventing and identifying mental health issues.

A service for preventing and identifying mental health issues in firefighters. By using technology to collect biological data, with this, it builds a graphic cue of the emotional estate and distance between the firefighter and its partner and the firefighter and the other members of the crew. with this information, on the one hand, crew members can support each other and better assess when mental health support services are needed. And on the other hand, partner and firefighter will be able to visualize emotional gaps caused by their different daily experiences, facilitating conversations and empathy. Umeus does not try to solve the difficulties of the job, but to embrace protective factors that can prevent mental health issues from escalating.

Umeus works by translating emotional biological data into visual cues. These cues are meant to show the distance between the emotional state of partners without disclosing the specific emotion, provoking a conversation. At the same time, the visual cue for the firefighter team shows an overall estate of the team which helps the firefighters and the captain to react to difficult situations and keep the morale high.