Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Because a rapid aging of society is being realized, evacuation planning that considers the inclusion of aged people is becoming very important. For the introduction of the design guide for evacuation from barrier-free buildings, experiments have been widely conducted using an ordinary person wearing an “elderly simulator”, which is called “Instant Senior”, mostly for safety reasons. However, the reproducibility of the evacuation behavior of elderly people has not yet been established, therefore the behavior of groups with ordinary people along with Instant Seniors are compared with those of ordinary people with Actual Seniors in order to study the suitability of using Instant Seniors instead of Actual Seniors. From the results, we concluded that Instant Seniors are appropriate as subjects for modeling the walking behavior of a group evacuation, from the point that they become obstacles to ordinary people as Actual Seniors actually do. Attention to the method of using Instant Seniors to improve reproducibility is also discussed.