Title: Elderly and fire safety: using serious games to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios

Authors: João E. Almeida; Rosaldo J.F. Rossetti; Brígida Mónica Faria; António Leça Coelho

Addresses: Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores (LIACC), Departamento de Engenharia Informática (DEI), Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, S/N 4200-465 Porto, Portugal ' Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores (LIACC), Departamento de Engenharia Informática (DEI), Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, S/N 4200-465 Porto, Portugal ' Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ESTSP-IPP), Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, S/N 4200-465 Porto, Portugal ' Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil (LNEC), Av. Brasil, 101, 1700-066, Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract: The problem of leaving a building while facing some emergency has gained much attention from the scientific community. Evacuation simulators can help emergency planners to assess the safety of buildings. However, such simulators still lack behavioural knowledge to increase their accuracy. The elderly have specific behaviour idiosyncrasies. This paper presents a set of experiments designed to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios using serious games, applied to a population sample of 20 adults aged over 65 years. They were presented three experiments (alarm id, exit-choice in five different situations and auditorium with four situations) and their reactions were collected. Results were analysed and compared with previous similar experiments. Future directions in this research include: to expand and to refine data collection to other scenarios and perform massive data collection using the internet; and to use this data to feed and enhance existing crowd simulators particularly for evacuation purposes.

Keywords: serious games; fire safety; elderly behaviour; behaviour analysis; human behaviour; evacuation scenarios; old people; emergency management; emergency evacuation; emergency planning; crowd simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDH.2016.079914

International Journal of the Digital Human, 2016 Vol.1 No.3, pp.263 - 281

Received: 03 Aug 2015
Accepted: 10 May 2016
Published online: 20 Oct 2016 *

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