We propose SmartEscape, a real-time, dynamic, intelligent and user-specific evacuation system with a mobile interface for emergency cases such as fire. Unlike past work, we explore dynamically changing conditions and calculate a personal route for an evacuee by considering his/her individual features. SmartEscape, which is fast, low-cost, low resource-consuming and mobile supported, collects various environmental sensory data and takes evacuees' individual features into account, uses an artificial neural network (ANN) to calculate personal usage risk of each link in the building, eliminates the risky ones, and calculates an optimum escape route under existing circumstances. Then, our system guides the evacuee to the exit through the calculated route with vocal and visual instructions on the smartphone. While the position of the evacuee is detected by RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) technology, the changing environmental conditions are measured by the various sensors in the building. Our ANN (Artificial Neural Network) predicts dynamically changing risk states of all links according to changing environmental conditions. Results show that SmartEscape, with its 98.1% accuracy for predicting risk levels of links for each individual evacuee in a building, is capable of evacuating a great number of people simultaneously, through the shortest and the safest route.
The concept of clustering is to separate clusters based on the similarity which is greater within cluster than among clusters. The similarity consists of two principles, namely, connectivity and cohesion. However, in partitional clustering, while some algorithms such as K-means and K-medians divides the dataset points according to the first principle (connectivity) based on centroid clusters without any regard to the second principle (cohesion), some others like K-medoids partially consider cohesion in addition to connectivity. This prevents to discover clusters with convex shape and results are affected negatively by outliers. In this paper a new Gravity Center Clustering (GCC) algorithm is proposed which depends on critical distance (λ) to define threshold among clusters. The algorithm falls under partition clustering and is based on gravity center which is a point within cluster that verifies both the connectivity and cohesion in determining the similarity of each point in the dataset. Therefore, the proposed algorithm deals with any shape of data better than K-means, K-medians and K-medoids. Furthermore, GCC algorithm does not need any parameters beforehand to perform clustering but can help user improving the control over clustering results and deal with overlapping and outliers providing two coefficients and an indicator. In this study, 22 experiments are conducted using different types of synthetic, and real healthcare datasets. The results show that the proposed algorithm satisfies the concept of clustering and provides great flexibility to get the optimal solution especially since clustering is considered as an optimization problem.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.