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.
Highlights
When an emergency occurs, emergency workers have to deal with an exceptional situation where activities and time to perform them are determinant for an effective response
Based on the requirements of the alert notification systems and emergency evacuation routes, we have defined a set of criteria that must be achieved by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems, which can be integrated into the definition of an Emergency ActionPlan (EAP) in order to complement the traditional processes
In the literature there are several contributions in the area of evacuation and accessibility: models and simulations have been proposed to improve the efficiency of the evacuation process, studying mainly trajectories of individuals or groups of individuals and how people with disability could affect them. Analyzing these contributions and existing notification and evacuation systems, we have identified a set of seven criteria for making ICT-based systems an efficient support for traditional evacuation procedures
Summary
Emergency workers have to deal with an exceptional situation where activities and time to perform them are determinant for an effective response. Provide evacuation routes to all kinds of users, including impaired people as well as contextually disabled who due to physical problems (such as noise or lack of visibility) or cognitive ones (inability to understand the language in which the alerts and routes are notified or lack of familiarity with the context) can be considered as a special vulnerable group This way, our proposal is integrated into the definition of an Emergency Action Plan and complements the traditional processes by improving the way individuals equipped with smartphones receive and visualize alerts and evacuation routes during particular emergency situations.
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