| Description |
Problem:
Navigating within large buildings may be difficult for some, especially in an emergency situation. An example of an emergency would be if a fire breaks out inside the building. Planning to find the safest and nearest exit can also become challenging if the origin of the fire is unknown to some of the people in the building.
The Indoor Safety Mapping system is an IoT system similar to traditional fire alarm systems, except it is a more intelligent one. Traditional fire alarm systems or any other safety alarm system come with sensors that trigger a loud noise to alert people of an existing danger or fire. Unfortunately, what it does not provide is a solution to help users exit the building in the safest way possible.
Many large companies with large manufacturing warehouses and facilities can sometimes have complex buildings that are hard to navigate through during an evacuation. In an event of a disaster such as a fire, gas leakage, or shooting, no instructions are provided to the user leaving the people inside the building lost and vulnerable.
Another issue with traditional fire systems is their cost of maintenance. The traditional fire system require that a staff of specialist tour the building to test each fire detection device on a periodic basis. With our IoT based solution, the functionality of the device will be constantly monitored.
Proposed Solution:
An indoor navigation system to map the closest and safest exit from the user’s current location would help solve this problem. The mobile application, using the building’s layout, would use augmented reality to lead the user to the closest and safest exit. A safety system installed in multiple places of the building would communicate with the application to retrieve real-time information about the whereabouts and severity of the disaster. This way, the safest exit can be routed.
Our solution comprises of a hardware device that is packed with IoT sensors connected to the cloud providing real time data from to the main admin application as well as user mobile app. The solution consists of the following:
For the hardware component, our objective is to have a compact circular or rectangle device (similar to the traditional fire alarm system) with many essential sensors for safety such as humidity, temperature, gas and smoke detection sensor. The hardware will read various inputs from all its sensors and presume the level of danger to inform and direct all the users of the potential issue.
The Desktop/Web App (meant for Admin use), will be the primary app the company will use to enter the locations of the devices in the companies building as well as the schematic of the building and its fire exits for a successful evacuation.
The Mobile App for user (Employee), is a mandatory safety app that the employees will download to help them receive notifications of the alerts and indoor mapping system for successful evacuation from the building. This is almost similar to the concept of google maps, however in this case it will have an indoor map of the building with guidance to evacuate.
The app will also have other capabilities and redundancy such as connecting the user to the emergency services in case they are trapped. In addition, the app is not only meant to be used during dire emergencies; on the contrary it is also a system to help employees become aware of other less potentially disastrous events that have been detected from the devices installed in various parts of the company building.
Although it might seem that this solution is only a more sophisticated fire system it is in reality a safety system that can detect anomalies and incidents and direct a user to safety.
Another key point to highlight is that this solution has the objective of delivering the ultimate standard of safety, with a device packed with sensors that do not exist in any other traditional alarm systems. |