Final whistle in the football stadium: Clusters of people pushing towards the exit, everyone wants to go home quickly – often an unpleasant situation, even for those who are quick on their feet. It is even worse when danger is looming and a stadium or concert hall has to be cleared. Such a crisis quickly turns into a nightmare for people who cannot walk or see well. “When we talk about inclusion, we often only talk about how people with disabilities can get to events, but not how they can leave these venues again safely – we are eliminating these shortcomings with the SiME project,” explains Dr. Stefan Holl from the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-7).

The German abbreviation SiME stands for “safety for people with physical, mental or age-related disabilities”. In this three-year interdisciplinary research association, scientists work together with affected people to optimise escape and evacuation options for people who cannot leave a building without help or who do not recognise that there is a danger. The reason: “Previous evacuation plans have been developed primarily for people without disabilities. There is a lot of catching up to do,” explains Holl.

SCHEDULING MORE TIME

Against this background, the scientists carried out a large-scale experiment in a factory hall to record the movement behaviour of people with and without impairments: around 100 men and women pushed their way through a narrow corridor in 144 individual tests on two days. Cameras and sensors recorded the movements of each individual person. Holl and his colleagues use the data to calculate different evacuation scenarios.

They did so, for example, in another, smaller study in a residential care home of “Lebenshilfe Bergisches Land”, an institution for disabled people. The focus was on organisational aspects and activities that take place before a building is evacuated, such as putting bedridden people into an evacuation chair, the so-called Evac Chair. The researchers also timed how long a rescuer needed to get someone to safety via the stairs using the chair or an evacuation mattress. “In everyday life, hardly anyone has anything to do with such rescue equipment. So in the event of a crisis, there is a great deal of uncertainty, possibly combined with a life-threatening time delay,” explains Holl. Training concepts are needed, and evacuation plans must also be based on more realistic time assumptions.

Holl expects final results in spring 2019. The employees of Lebenshilfe have taken the first appropriate measures: They are getting their building inspected, and a new fire protection concept is being developed. “A sign that our work won’t just be buried in the files,” Holl sums up.

Katja Lüers