InLoc: Location-aware emergency evacuation assistant

Abstract

Healthcare services and research centre reports estimate that by 2050, Americans aged 65 or older will reach the 89 million mark, this is more than double the number of older adults in the United States in 2010. In an aging society, it is important to home care elderly and maintain their daily needs and provide safe evacuation alternatives in the case emergency. Hence, this paper aims to implement and evaluate a smart and location-aware indoor emergency evacuation system for elderly users. The prototype system employs multiple Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacon sensors and a smartphone. The smartphone utilizes the beacon signals to estimate its location within the building and uses the sensor data transmitted by the iBeacons to identify the level of threat (if any) to the elderly user and guide him/her to a safe zone in the case of fire, earthquake etc. Our prototype was tested in three different locations utilizing two different types of sensors. The results show that our system can detect a threat and guide the elderly user with minimum 85.47 centimeters and maximum 239.8 centimeters distance error.