PERIL: Prevention of Emergency Risks by Indoor Localization

Abstract

The PERIL project starts from the collaboration of the MoBiVAP research group and the Health and Safety Service at the University of Valladolid (Spain), and the Castilla y León regional government. The aim of the project is to keep track of persons inside buildings, with the main goal of facilitating localization in case of an emergency. The PERIL project consists of the installation and evaluation of an innovative solution developed by the MoBiVAP research group, with the collaboration of RDNest, a start-up company in the field of IoT. The solution developed consists in the use of Low Energy Bluetooth (LEB) beacons that are carried out by the users of the building, and a grid of static, custom receiving antennas. These antennas collect the emissions from the beacons, and estimate the distance between each beacon and itself. This information is sent to a cloud based service, that uses this information to locate each beacon inside the building, and to draw the position at real time in a web-based browser. The resulting system allows to track the location and movement of people inside the building (where GPS does not work) with a precision within two meters and at a very affordable cost. In this work we will describe the use of this solution, called XtremeLoc, in the evacuation drill of the School of I nformatics at the University of Valladolid. A grid of more than 30 receiving antennas allowed to individually track the movement of a representative set of more than 50 persons during the drill. This paper will examine the lessons learnt, showing how this technology allows to know the preferred evacuation routes, detect bottlenecks and precisely measure evacuation time.