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80
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Introduction
Interested in human behavior in fire, evacuation, perception and action. Mostly using empirical methods and data analysis. Research Officer at National Research Council Canada and Adjunct Faculty in Cognitive Science at Carleton University.
Additional affiliations
September 2018 - present
July 2016 - present
April 2014 - June 2016
Publications
Publications (80)
Road tunnels are enclosed spaces that most occupants only experience while driving through them. In case of fire, however, occupants potentially need to evacuate on foot from a dangerous and unfamiliar environment. Clear and accurate guidance is important for an efficient and safe evacuation from tunnels. Common cues for evacuation guidance are a s...
This short communication presents the findings of the work conducted by the human behaviour in fire permanent working group of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. Its aim is to identify determinants of research gaps in the field of human behaviour in fire. Two workshops were conducted in 2023 in which research gaps were identifie...
Individual differences in mobility (e.g., due to wheelchair use) are often ignored in the prediction of crowd movement. Consequently, engineering tools cannot fully describe the impact of vulnerable populations on egress performance. To contribute to closing this gap, we performed laboratory experiments with 25 pedestrians with varying mobility pro...
Wildfires are a growing threat to wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities. Globally over the last decade hundreds of wildfire related deaths have occurred along with hundreds of billions in economic losses. If the encroachment of fire into a community cannot be stopped, evacuation becomes necessary to save lives. In response to the increasing th...
Access to dangerous goods training for firefighters in remote areas is limited for financial and logistical reasons. Virtual reality (VR) is a promising solution for this challenge as it is cost-effective, safe, and allows to simulate realistic scenarios that would be dangerous or difficult to implement in the real world. However, rigorous evaluati...
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This paper introduces a protocol for the verification of multi-physics wildfire evacuation models, including a set of tests used to ensure that the conceptual modelling representation of each modelling layer is accurately implemented, as well as the interactions between different modelling layers and sub-models (wildfire spread, pedest...
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Wildfires are increasing in scale, frequency and longevity, and are affecting new locations as environmental conditions change. This paper presents a dataset collected during a community evacuation drill performed in Roxborough Park, Colorado (USA) in 2019. This is a wildland-urban interface community including approximately 900 homes....
Despite considerable research efforts, most controlled empirical studies on crowd movement usually rely on homogeneous crowds, i.e., research participants are typically young adults without disabilities. Consequently, relatively little is known about pedestrian movement in more diverse and heterogeneous crowd conditions, e.g., when persons with red...
This paper reports on our progress in the development of a virtual reality (VR) training environment where novice first responders in remote areas are acquiring situational awareness and procedural knowledge for the management of dangerous goods transportation incidents. Our research and development efforts aim to address the problem of providing e...
Despite considerable research efforts, most controlled empirical studies on crowd movement usually rely on homogeneous crowds, i.e., research participants are typically young adults without disabilities. Consequently, little is known about pedestrian movement in more diverse and heterogeneous crowd conditions, e.g., when persons with reduced mobili...
Emotional experience can influence cognitive estimates such as perceived psychological distance and time judgements. These estimators are crucial in threatening situations like the COVID-19 pandemic because the subjective perception of the closeness of a potential infection might influence behaviour. However, to date it remains unclear how fear aff...
Active listening plays an important role in the relationship between clients and therapists. Here, we investigated whether variations of the confirmatory nonlexical verbal communication signal “mmh” influenced perceived authenticity, empathy, and understanding of a listener. Eighty-one participants were in a conversation with an interviewer and rep...
After the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed in Germany, various measures limiting contact between people were introduced across the country. The implementation of these measures varied between jurisdictions and potentially had a negative impact on the psychological well-being of many people. However, the prevalence, severity, and type of symptoms o...
Active listening plays an important role in the relationship between clients and therapists. Here, we investigated whether variations of the confirmatory nonlexical verbal communication signal “mmh” influenced perceived authenticity, empathy, and understanding of a listener. Eighty-one participants were in a conversation with an interviewer and rep...
Movement on stairs is a crucial factor that influences people’s ability to evacuate from buildings in fire emergencies. In fact, the accessibility of stairs during multilevel evacuations is considered to be a criterion for the tenability of a building. Biomechanical analyses of pedestrian staircase descent add nuance by characterizing factors relev...
Wildfires are a significant safety risk to populations adjacent to wildland areas, known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI). This paper introduces a modelling platform called WUI-NITY. The platform is built on the Unity3D game engine and simulates and visualises human behaviour and wildfire spread during an evacuation of WUI communities. The pur...
It is unclear how building occupants take information from the social and built environment into account when choosing an egress route during emergency evacuation. Conflicting tendencies have been previously reported: to follow the crowd, to avoid congestion, and to avoid unknown egress routes alone. We hypothesize that these tendencies depend on a...
Planned egress drills are required by building codes around the world, and are commonly used to both train occupants and assess evacuation procedures. However, capturing the idea of a “successful” drill is often difficult. Data from both drills and unplanned evacuations are often incomplete and unreliable, which raises a key question: How well-matc...
Evacuation drills are generally the main mechanism for improving or measuring occupant performance in emergency situations, but their effectiveness is often hard to measure, and there is limited evidence for sustained training benefits. However, innovations in technology (e.g., augmented/virtual reality, novel sensors and wearable tech) offer (when...
Human behavior in fire research, the number of evacuation models being developed, and the complexity of the models themselves has dramatically increased in recent years. This has led to a proliferation of evacuation model usage within the building design process. The vast majority of research within the evacuation modelling community is focused on...
Since the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed in Germany, various lockdown measures were imposed across the country that likely had a large impact on psychological well-being. In the current study, we investigate depressive symptoms as depression is a leading contributor to the global burden of disease and potentially life-threatening. This study rep...
The analysis of evacuee behaviour and performance requires data on human behaviour from actual fire incidents. Unfortunately, such data is rarely collected and, if available, is often provided in different formats and levels of refinement, and does not provide sufficient narrative understanding. The lack of a standardized approach to collecting and...
Evacuation effectively mitigates potential harm for building occupants in case of emergencies. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) have emerged as research tools and means to enhance evacuation preparedness and effectiveness. Unlike VR, where users are immersed in computer-generated environments, the more novel AR technology allows users to e...
Water mist systems are considered for the protection of timber buildings because they use significantly less amounts of water and consequently less post-water damage. Current water mist system standards and testing protocols do not consider fire scenarios involving exposed timber elements, which pose greater fire load and hazards. Therefore, withou...
Fire engineering has developed into a mainstream engineering discipline within the building design process. Building fire codes are increasingly complex, comprising thousands of requirements regarding a wide range of topics that must be considered. Fire engineers are required to possess increasingly complex knowledge about a variety of subjects, al...
The analysis of evacuee behaviour and performance requires data from actual fire incidents. Unfortunately, such data is rarely collected and, if available, is often provided in an array of formats and levels of refinement. The lack of a standardized approach at collecting and reporting such data hinders our understanding of human behaviour in fire,...
A poster of the key contents of the paper.
A poster of the key content of the paper in Chinese.
Wildland‐urban interface (WUI) fire incidents are likely to become more severe and will affect more and more people. Given their scale and complexity, WUI incidents require a multidomain approach to assess their impact and the effectiveness of any mitigation efforts. The authors recently produced a specification for a simulation framework that quan...
This paper presents the findings of the workshop “New approaches to evacuation modelling”, which took place on the 11th of June 2017 in Lund (Sweden) within the Symposium of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). The workshop gathered international experts in the field of fire evacuation modelling from 19 different countries...
Fire engineering has developed from a niche subject into a mainstream engineering discipline employed within the building design process. Building fire codes are increasingly complex, commonly comprising thousands of requirements regarding a wide range of topics that must be considered. In general, fire engineers are required to possess increasingl...
People typically rely heavily on visual information when finding their way to unfamiliar locations. For individuals with reduced vision, there are a variety of navigational tools available to assist with this task if needed. However, for wayfinding in unfamiliar indoor environments the applicability of existing tools is limited. One potential appro...
Raw data and example code.
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Illuminated emergency exit signs inform building occupants about safe egress routes in emergencies. These exit signs are often found in the presence of other colored signs, which may distract occupants when searching for safe exits. Such distractions can lead to confusing and even harmful outcomes, especially if occupants misinterpret the sign colo...
Accurate real-time estimates of one’s orientation are essential for moving about an environment. During movement, several dynamic sensory cues contribute to estimates of heading orientation, such as vestibular signals and optic flow. We examined the ability of observers to estimate their orientation from the static information present in their loca...
SIGNIFICANCE For people with limited vision, wearable displays hold the potential to digitally enhance visual function. As these display technologies advance, it is important to understand their promise and limitations as vision aids.
PURPOSE The aim of this study was to test the potential of a consumer augmented reality (AR) device for improving...
The Publisher regrets an error in the original version of this article. In Section 5, under PADM (protective action decision model) classification, “Pre-decision stage” was erroneously listed twice. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
Movement to the familiar' has been reported during evacuation incidents but has not yet been studied in controlled experiments. We investigate effects of exit familiarity and egress behavior of other pedestrians on exit choice in an ambulatory virtual environment. Participants walked into a virtual museum through a 'familiar' door and were asked to...
During a fire evacuation, once an individual perceives cues from a fire event, they must interpret them to assess the new situation and determine whether action is required. It is proposed that this assessment and action selection can employ either an automatic or reflective processing system depending on the nature of the situation and the experie...
Collecting empirical data on crowd dynamics is challenging. The methods available to researchers typically need to compromise between ecological validity and experimental control. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that virtual reality (VR) offers a promising solution to the dilemma. The first section of this chapter introduces VR as a rese...
This document presents the contributions of the Workshop "New approaches to evacuation modelling" that took place on the 11 th of June 2017 in Lund, Sweden within the Symposium of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). The scope of the workshop was to get insights into the building fire evacuation modelling world from expert...
In 1923, Gelb and Granit, using a method of adjustment for a small red light, reported a lower threshold for the target when presented on a ground region than on an adjacent figural region. More recent work in perceptual organization has found precisely the opposite—a processing advantage seems to go to items presented on the figure, not the ground...
The familiarity hypothesis postulates that building occupants are drawn towards familiar places during emergencies (Sime, 1980). 'Movement to the familiar' has been reported during various evacuation incidents, but thus far, has not been studied experimentally. The present experiment investigates how movement to a familiar exit interacts with visua...
Virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool to study evacuation behavior as it allows experimentally controlled, safe simulation of otherwise dangerous situations. However, validation studies comparing evacuation behavior in real and virtual environments are still scarce. We compare the decision to evacuate in response to a fire alarm in matched physi...
Finding the way out of a building during evacuation is not an easy task. Ideally, instructions provide clear and unambiguous information to occupants about the best means to evacuate. However, many times, building occupants may find the best course of action is not always clear. Conflicting or ambiguous cues can make a process that requires a quick...
Finding the way out of a building during evacuation is not an easy task. Ideally, instructions provide clear and unambiguous information to occupants about the best means to evacuate. However, many times, building occupants may find the best course of action is not always clear. Conflicting or ambiguous cues can make a process that requires a quick...
Risk perception (RP) is studied in many research disciplines (e.g., safety engineering, psychology, and sociology). Definitions of RP can be broadly divided into expectancy-value and risk-as-feeling approaches. In the present review, RP is seen as the personalization of the risk related to a current event, such as an ongoing fire emergency; it is i...
Introduction
Evacuation from tunnel fire emergencies may become problematic if tunnel occupants do not engage quickly enough into evacuation. Dangerous goods transporters increase the risks tunnel occupants are exposed to. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of an increased risk during a simulated tunnel emergency on particip...
Virtual reality (VR) enables the study of visually-guided behavior in situations that are otherwise not amenable to laboratory research. An example is a fire evacuation scenario, in which building occupants have to find their way to safety through smoke and flames, identify safe egress routes, and avoid threats. First, however, it must be determine...
A case study on the analysis of evacuation travel paths in virtual reality (VR) tunnel fire experiments is presented to increase the understanding on evacuation behaviour. A novel method based on the study of the parametric equations of the occupants’ evacuation travel paths using vector operators inspired by functional analysis theory and the new...
Virtual Reality (VR) experiments are becoming an increasingly popular research method in the area of human behaviour in fire. In VR experiments, participants are immersed in a computer generated Virtual Environment (VE). In this paper, examples of VR technologies, namely Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems and Head Mounted Displays (H...
Social Influence (SI) plays an important role in tunnel fire evacuation, as seeing other occupants (bystanders) stay passive may both decrease the likelihood and increase the time of occupants’ evacuation decision. In addition exit and route choice of others influences occupants’ travel paths. The present study investigates if and how passive bysta...
Evacuation from a smoke filled tunnel requires quick decision-making and swift action from the tunnel occupants. Technical installations such as emergency signage aim to guide tunnel occupants to the closest emergency exits. However, conflicting information may come from the behavior of other tunnel occupants. We examined if and how conflicting soc...
The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the use of elevators for occupant evacuation from high-rise buildings with a focus on the safety of mobility impaired occupants. It addresses the specifics of evacuation via elevators, relevant building codes, and its technical challenges. Information was collected on how selected buildings ar...
Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular approach to study human behavior in fire. The present position paper analyses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of VR as a research tool for human behavior in fire. Virtual environments provide a maximum of experimental control, are easy to replicate, have relatively high ecological v...
Risk perception (RP) is studied in many research disciplines (e.g., safety engineering, psychology, and sociology), and the context in which RP is studied varies greatly. Definitions of RP can be broadly divided into expectancy-value and risk-as-feeling approaches. RP is seen as the personalization of the risk related to a current event, such as an...
Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular approach to study human behavior in fire. The present position paper analyses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of VR as a research tool for human behavior in fire. Virtual environments provide a maximum of experimental control, are easy to replicate, have relatively high ecological v...
In 1999, a tragic catastrophe occurred in the Mont Blanc Tunnel, one of the most important transalpine road tunnels. Twenty-seven of the victims never left their vehicles as a result of which they were trapped in smoke and suffocated (Beard & Carvel, 2005). Immediate evacuation is crucial in tunnel fires, but still many tunnel users stay passive. D...
Immediate user self-evacuation is crucial in case of fire in road tunnels. This study investigated the effects of information with or without additional virtual reality (VR) behavioural training on self-evacuation during a simulated emergency situation in a road tunnel. Forty-three participants were randomly assigned to three groups with accumulati...
Traffic accidentsmay cause enormous stress and can possibly affect the physical and psychologicalwell-being of the people involved. Traffic accidents are a risk factor for acute and posttraumatic stress disorder. Two studies examined stress experience, driving behavior discussed in this paper and the moderating influence of perceived responsibility...
Immediate user self-evacuation is crucial in case of fire in road tunnels. Social Influence (SI) may affect the evacuation process. Using a virtual reality road tunnel scenario, this study investigated the effect of information about adequate behavior in critical situations in road tunnels and SI on the driver’s behavior. Sixty participants conduct...
Neurologic hallmarks of Fabry disease (FD) include small fiber neuropathy as well as cerebral micro- and macroangiopathy with premature stroke. Cranial MRI shows progressive white matter lesions (WML) at an early age, increased signal intensity in the pulvinar, and tortuosity and dilatation of the larger vessels. To unravel the most promising imagi...