Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments

Abstract

The preparedness phase is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards. During this phase, emergency plans are developed to establish, among other procedures, evacuation and emergency escape routes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support and improve these procedures providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to all people in the affected zone. Current emergency management and evacuation systems do not adapt information to the context and the profile of each person, so messages received in the emergency might be useless. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria that ICT-based systems could achieve in order to avoid this problem adapting emergency alerts and evacuation routes to different situations and people. Moreover, in order to prove the applicability of such criteria, we define a mechanism that can be used as a complement of traditional evacuation systems to provide personalized alerts and evacuation routes to all kinds of people during emergency situations in working places. This mechanism is composed by three main components: CAP-ONES for notifying emergency alerts, NERES for defining emergency plans and generating personalized evacuation routes, and iNeres as the interface to receive and visualize these routes on smartphones. The usability and understandability of proposed interface has been assessed through a user study performed in a fire simulation in an indoor environment. This evaluation demonstrated that users considered iNeres easy to understand, to learn and to use, and they also found very innovative the idea to use smartphones as a support for escaping instead of static signals on walls and doors.

Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

“…In order to show the applicability of SEMA4A, here we present a scenario of use of a notification system developed for sending personalized evacuation routes in indoor environments through mobile devices (Aedo et al, 2012).This system executes several queries over SEMA4A in order to guarantee the personalization of evacuation routes depending on several variables: user's abilities or impairments, levels of expertise on the surrounding environment (e.g. an employee might be familiar with a building while a visitor might easily get lost), needs or preferences, current location, media and technology being available, characteristics of the surrounding environment and emergency context (e.g.…”

Enhancing Evacuation Plans with a Situation Awareness System Based on End-User Knowledge Provision

“…This work focuses on the effectiveness of these notifications in terms of accessibility, mainly analyzing whether these systems consider people's profiles and preferences. Studied proposals [13] address effective emergency notification and evacuation by considering research in multimodal alerts, but, in our opinion, they should also consider context awareness concepts and the type of the device [14] communicating. Other works related to notifications highlight the necessity of a standard for notifications and accessibility [15].…”

“…Other papers, for example Aedo et al [13], also take into account the importance of customized evacuation routes. Evacuation routes vary with respect to the context of each person and the characteristics of the emergency situation.…”

Effects of a Sprinkler on Evacuation Dynamics in Fire

“…In addition, when evacuees entered the region of smoke that was reproduced using the FDS, they were considered to be overwhelmed by the smoke. The velocity of movement of an evacuee was determined based on the value [6] obtained when an evacuee moved while kneeling down. The width of the dangerous area was fixed as 1.2 m. The simulation was performed five times with different initial allocations of evacuees, and the average evacuation time was obtained.…”

“…A fire in an enclosed space, such as a room in a building, is generally called a compartment fire. The preparedness phase for fire is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards [6]. To set the proper evacuation route, some technically support systems have been developed [7].…”