Adaptive Serious Games for Emergency Evacuation Training

Abstract

The preparation of evacuation plans for public buildings and the related training is mandated by law in many countries. The traditional approaches for providing people with the correct emergency information tend to be based on long, written instructions, posted on doors and walls that are not necessarily read by occupants and on evacuation drills that are costly, rarely performed and focused on specific scenarios. To overcome these limits we propose an engaging approach for evacuation training, targeted towards primary and secondary school students and based on adaptive serious games. The student is immersed in a virtual environment representing his/her school during an emergency with the aim of evacuating and adopting the correct behaviour. Any performed action is evaluated by the system, feedback is provided immediately and also when the game ends. Recovery training material is automatically arranged and provided to the student to explain any errors he/she made and to help reach better subsequent performances. Ontologies have been used to represent emergency skills and to relate them to possible actions within the game environment. Action-based assessment and sequencing techniques have been applied to arrange useful training material.