FireGuide: A context-aware fire response guide for the building occupants

Context-awareness is a basic requirement of ubiquitous computing applications. While lots of good efforts have been made to deliver context-aware tour guide or museum guide, we ask ourselves: "can we build a context-aware fire guide to assist on-site fire victims to escape from a fire?" In reality, many people lose their lives in fire disasters due to bad judgment. Poor decisions are likely made in urgent situations. Timely and appropriate guidance is thus crucial to help people safely escape from the hazardous situations. So far, various pervasive computing techniques have been used to assist the firefighters in different aspects of their mission. However, not much research has been reported on assisting the occupants with personal and user-centric devices. In this paper, we present the idea of designing a context-aware fire response guide (FireGuide) for the building occupants from a technical perspective. By sensing the context of the building on fire and the occupants in the building, FireGuide advises either the fastest safe escape route or an action-list for "no-way-out" people. We evaluate the applicability of FireGuide through both user studies and experiments, which show that context-awareness in such a fire response guide can help improve the egress time. We also highlight the lessons we learn in designing such mission-critical context-aware applications in the paper.