A voice-driven IMU-enabled BIM-based multi-user system for indoor navigation in fire emergencies

Real-time location information between participants is critical but scarcely available during fire emergencies, making response operations solitary and inefficient. To address the issue, this study proposes a system that provides dynamic pathfinding, position tracking, and location sharing to on-site emergency participants via instinctive human-system interactions. The system consists of four modules, namely building information modeling-based indoor route planning, voice-based command processing, inertial sensor-based continuous positioning, and a multi-user sharing environment. The feasibility of the system is assessed by an exploratory user test with a real-world case study. The results show that the system enables participants to track and share locations with others timely and plan a route dynamically for response operations. The results further suggest that the system can potentially provide fundamental techniques to establish new mechanisms for supporting decision-making and enable comparative evaluations on adopted technologies to develop human-centered emergency response systems.