How to help elderly in indoor evacuation wayfinding: Design and test of a not-invasive solution for reducing fire egress time in building heritage scenarios

Population aging increases the importance of emergency safety for elderly, especially in complex and unfamiliar spaces. Individuals who can autonomously move should be encouraged to evacuate by themselves, and adequate help should be provided to them. To this aim, a “behavioral design” approach of these elderly facilities is proposed: understanding behaviors and needs in emergency; designing systems for interacting with them during an emergency; testing solutions in real environment or by using validated simulators. Wayfinding tasks are fundamental aspects in evacuation: elderly have to receive proper information about paths to be used, in the simplest, clearest and most unequivocal way, so as to reduce wrong behavioral choices and building egress time as much as possible. This work proposes a robust wayfinding system based on photoluminescent material (PLM) tiles with continuous applications along paths. Tests concerning a significant case study (an historical theatre) evidence how the proposed system allow to significantly increase elderly evacuation speed (more than 20%) in respect to the traditional system. It could be introduced in other buildings for increasing elderly safety and data are useful to define man-wayfinding systems interactions.