Browsing by Author "de Schot L"

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    Decoding Hospital Evacuation Drills: Pre-movement and Movement Analysis in New Zealand
    (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2025-04-24) Geoerg P; de Schot L; Lovreglio R
    Hospital evacuations present unique challenges due to the dependency of patients on medical staff and specialized equipment, making the process particularly complex. This study investigates the pre-movement and movement phases during hospital evacuation drills conducted in New Zealand, providing rare and valuable data that are critical for improving evacuation modeling in healthcare settings. Eight evacuation drills were conducted across various hospital units, including General Ward (GW) spaces, a Hyper Acute Stroke Unit (HASU), a High Dependency Unit (HDU), and a Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), with detailed documentation and analysis of preparation times, pre-movement times, and evacuation speeds. The results reveal significant variability in pre-movement times, heavily influenced by the specific needs of different units and the evacuation methods employed (e.g., beds, wheelchairs, walking). High-acuity units like the HDU, where patients require extensive medical support, exhibited notably longer active preparation times due to the complexity of disconnecting medical equipment. Additionally, horizontal movement speeds were slower for patients evacuated on beds compared to those using wheelchairs or walking. Given the rarity of such data and the uncertainty about the applicability of findings from other building types, this study underscores the need for tailored evacuation strategies that consider the distinct requirements of hospital environments. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for the dependencies on medical personnel and equipment, contributing to more accurate and effective evacuation planning in healthcare facilities. Further, the findings highlight the nuanced behaviours observed during healthcare evacuations, and provide valuable inputs for fire and evacuation modellers when designing for healthcare occupancies.
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    Exploring single-line walking in immersive virtual reality
    (Elsevier B.V., 2023-08-16) de Schot L; Nilsson D; Lovreglio R; Cunningham T; Till S
    With increasing rates of elderly and obese people in the population, questions are being raised about the validity of inputs used by computer evacuation models to predict the movement of crowds in the built environment. The objective of this study is to examine the movement of individuals in a VR environment. Exploring individual movement in VR (where the individual is exposed to a virtual environment with virtual agents while actually moving alone in the physical environment) is a necessary step on the path to determining if VR is a useful tool to gather new crowd movement data. Specifically, this work presents the results of two experiments that were conducted to measure the correlation between inter-person distance (the distance from a participant to a virtual agent) and walking speed. Results show a positive correlation between walking speed and the inter-person distance for inter-person distances between 1.0 and 1.5 m. Above inter-person distances of 1.5 m, walking speed was not dependent on inter-person distance. An important finding from this work is no observed significant difference in the relationship between walking speed and inter-person distance across both experimental setups – ‘pushing’ or ‘following’ configurations. Finally, this work shows the potential of gathering individual movement data using VR.