3,368 research outputs found
AmIE: An Ambient Intelligent Environment for Assisted Living
In the modern world of technology Internet-of-things (IoT) systems strives to
provide an extensive interconnected and automated solutions for almost every
life aspect. This paper proposes an IoT context-aware system to present an
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment; such as an apartment, house, or a
building; to assist blind, visually-impaired, and elderly people. The proposed
system aims at providing an easy-to-utilize voice-controlled system to locate,
navigate and assist users indoors. The main purpose of the system is to provide
indoor positioning, assisted navigation, outside weather information, room
temperature, people availability, phone calls and emergency evacuation when
needed. The system enhances the user's awareness of the surrounding environment
by feeding them with relevant information through a wearable device to assist
them. In addition, the system is voice-controlled in both English and Arabic
languages and the information are displayed as audio messages in both
languages. The system design, implementation, and evaluation consider the
constraints in common types of premises in Kuwait and in challenges, such as
the training needed by the users. This paper presents cost-effective
implementation options by the adoption of a Raspberry Pi microcomputer,
Bluetooth Low Energy devices and an Android smart watch.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Building Information Modeling as Tool for Enhancing Disaster Resilience of the Construction Industry
As frequencies of the disasters are increasing, new technologies can be used to enhance
disaster resilience performance of the construction industry. This paper investigates
the usage of BIM (Building Information Modeling) in enhancing disaster resilience of
the construction industry and in the establishment of the resilient built environment.
In-depth literature review findings reveal BIM’s contribution to the disaster resilience in the
pre-disaster and post-disaster phases especially through influencing the performance of
the supply chain, construction process, and rescue operations. This paper emphasises
the need for BIM’s integration to the education and training curriculums of the built
environment professionals. Policy makers, construction professionals, professional
bodies, academics can benefit from this research
Cloud Enabled Emergency Navigation Using Faster-than-real-time Simulation
State-of-the-art emergency navigation approaches are designed to evacuate
civilians during a disaster based on real-time decisions using a pre-defined
algorithm and live sensory data. Hence, casualties caused by the poor decisions
and guidance are only apparent at the end of the evacuation process and cannot
then be remedied. Previous research shows that the performance of routing
algorithms for evacuation purposes are sensitive to the initial distribution of
evacuees, the occupancy levels, the type of disaster and its as well its
locations. Thus an algorithm that performs well in one scenario may achieve bad
results in another scenario. This problem is especially serious in
heuristic-based routing algorithms for evacuees where results are affected by
the choice of certain parameters. Therefore, this paper proposes a
simulation-based evacuee routing algorithm that optimises evacuation by making
use of the high computational power of cloud servers. Rather than guiding
evacuees with a predetermined routing algorithm, a robust Cognitive Packet
Network based algorithm is first evaluated via a cloud-based simulator in a
faster-than-real-time manner, and any "simulated casualties" are then re-routed
using a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm to obtain new safe paths for them to
exits. This approach can be iterated as long as corrective action is still
possible.Comment: Submitted to PerNEM'15 for revie
Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies
Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Indoor Localization for Fire Safety : A brief overview of fundamentals, needs and requirements and applications
An indoor localization system for positioning evacuating people can be anticipated to increase the chances of a safe evacuation and effective rescue intervention in case of a tunnel fire. Such a system may utilize prevalent wireless technologies, e.g., Bluetooth, RFID and Wi-Fi, which today are used to survey incoming and outgoing traffic to a certain space or location, to estimate group sizes and to measure the duration of visits during normal operation of buildings. Examples also exist of where the same wireless technologies are used for safety purposes, for example to assess real-time location, tracking and monitoring of vehicles, personnel and equipment in mining environments. However, they are relatively few, and typically rely on a high degree of control over the people that are to be tracked, and their association with (connection to) the localization system used for the tracking. In this report, the results of a brief overview of the literature within the field of indoor localization in general, and the application of indoor localization systems within the field of particularly fire safety, is summarized. This information forms the underlying basis for the planning and execution of a future field study, in which an indoor Wi-Fi localization system will be tested and evaluated in terms of if, and if so how, it can be used to position evacuating people in tunnels. Whereas such a system allows digital footprints to be collected within a wireless network infrastructure (also already existing ones), questions remains to be answered regarding aspects such as precision and accuracy, and furthermore, how these aspects are affected by other independent variables. In the end of this report, examples of research questions deemed necessary to answer in order to enable a sound evaluation of the system is presented. These need to be addressed in the future planning of the above-mentioned field study
Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)
This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio
Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments
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
Fog Computing Architecture for Indoor Disaster Management
Most people spend their time indoors. Indoors have a higher complexity than outdoors. Moreover, today's building structures are increasingly sophisticated and complex, which can create problems when a disaster occurs in the room. Fire is one of the disasters that often occurs in a building. For that, we need disaster management that can minimize the risk of casualties. Disaster management with cloud computing has been extensively investigated in other studies. Traditional ways of centralizing data in the cloud are almost scalable as they cannot cater to many latency-critical IoT applications, and this results in too high network traffic when the number of objects and services increased. It will be especially problematic when in a disaster that requires a quick response. The Fog infrastructure is the beginning of the answer to such problems. This research started with an analysis of literature and hot topics related to fog computing and indoor disasters, which later became the basis for creating a fog computing-based architecture for indoor disasters. In this research, fog computing is used as the backbone in disaster management architecture in buildings. MQTT is used as a messaging protocol with the advantages of simplicity and speed. This research proposes a disaster architecture for indoor disasters, mainly fire disasters
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