Development of Emergency Rescue Evacuation Support System (ERESS) in Panic-Type Disasters: Disaster Detection by Positioning Area of Terminals

Previously, the authors have proposed the Emergency Evacuation Support System (ERESS) for reducing disaster damage. The ERESS runs under Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) and primarily aims to reduce the number of victims in panic-type disasters. This system uses ERESS Mobile Terminals (EMT) which are mobile terminals assuming smartphones and tablets. EMT is provided with an advanced disaster detection algorithm and acquires sensor information such as acceleration, direction difference and walking steps. However, disaster detection of conventional ERESS is needed the information of all members existing on the same floor. In this paper, we propose a new disaster detection method using the positioning area information. Location information of the terminal holders are obtained by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). In this method, we separate a number of areas in the floor and detect a disaster by the information of evacuees in the presence of each area. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by panic-type experiments.