Support System Integrating Assistive Technologies for Fire Emergency Evacuation from Workplaces of Visually Impaired People
Source abstract
Abstract
Due to a complex of factors, visually impaired people are facing difficulties and increased risks during fire emergencies and evacuations from different types of buildings. Even if a lot of studies have been conducted to improve the mobility and autonomy of people with visual impairment during emergency evacuation processes, these offer only partial solutions, especially in the presence of uncertainties characteristic of fire evolution. Aiming for a more comprehensive approach to the safe evacuation of people with visual impairments, this paper proposes a support system that integrates innovative aspects related to the architecture of the application, modeling and simulation methods, and experimental realization. The system is decentralized, capable of anticipating possible fire extensions and determining, in real-time, new corresponding evacuation routes. The overall design complies with the standard norms in emergency situations. Two models, one developed in Stateflow and the other based on Delay Time Petri Nets (DTPN), were constructed to describe the dynamic behavior of the system in the presence of unexpected events that can change the initial recommended evacuation path. To test the functionality and efficiency of the proposed system, the conditions created by potential fire sources were simulated as a part of realistic scenarios. Tests were conducted with visually impaired people. Simulation and prototype testing showed that the presented system can improve evacuation times, achieving a measurable gain compared to scenarios where there is no information regarding fire evolution.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics · Tactile and Sensory Interactions · Human-Automation Interaction and Safety
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
Department of Automation, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
References (62)
Show source-provided references
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