LifeBelt: Crowd Evacuation Based on Vibro-Tactile Guidance

To increase crowd evacuation efficiency in emergency situations, the authors developed a wearable computer, LifeBelt, to guide individuals from emergency situations to escape. The LifeBelt collects position and orientation information about individuals from embedded sensors, shares this information with a background emergency coordination system, receives an individualized optimized escape strategy, and guides the individual via vibro-tactile stimulation, indicating direction and distance to the recommended exit. Simulation models indicate that the number of successful evacuations per unit time improve significantly using the LifeBelt technology.

[1]  José Rogan,et al.  Cellular automaton model for evacuation process with obstacles , 2007 .

[2]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Virtual Crowds: Methods, Simulation, and Control , 2008, Virtual Crowds: Methods, Simulation, and Control.

[3]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Virtual Crowds: Methods, Simulation, and Control (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Graphics and Animation) , 2008 .

[4]  Andreas Riener,et al.  Vibro-Tactile Space-Awareness , 2008 .

[5]  Shaobo Liu,et al.  Evacuation from a classroom considering the occupant density around exits , 2009 .

[6]  Michael Schreckenberg,et al.  Moore and more and symmetry , 2008, ArXiv.

[7]  A. Schadschneider,et al.  Simulation of pedestrian dynamics using a two dimensional cellular automaton , 2001 .

[8]  Baba,et al.  Cellular Automaton Model for Random Walkers. , 1996, Physical review letters.

[9]  Alois Ferscha,et al.  LifeBelt: Silent Directional Guidance for Crowd Evacuation , 2009, 2009 International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

[10]  Evren Samur,et al.  Human Haptic Perception , 2012 .

[11]  S. Maniccam,et al.  Adaptive decentralized congestion avoidance in two-dimensional traffic , 2006 .

[12]  M. Grunwald.  Human haptic perception : basics and applications , 2008 .

[13]  Alois Ferscha,et al.  On the Efficiency of LifeBelt Based Crowd Evacuation , 2009, 2009 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications.

[14]  Dirk Helbing,et al.  Experiment, theory, and simulation of the evacuation of a room without visibility. , 2004, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[15]  Yuan Weifeng,et al.  A novel algorithm of simulating multi-velocity evacuation based on cellular automata modeling and tenability condition , 2007 .

[16]  Hubert Klüpfel,et al.  Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications , 2009, Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science.

[17]  T. Nagatani,et al.  Statistical characteristics of evacuation without visibility in random walk model , 2004 .