PEAR: Personal evacuation and rescue system

In the past decade, people have witnessed more and more mass natural or man-made disasters. An efficient and flexible evacuation and rescue system is needed to save lives from various mass disasters. Although there exist some public emergency evacuation systems, these systems are not flexible to handle various disasters can not cooperate well. In addition, they are not efficient enough timely to update evacuation plans or routes to victims. In this work, we propose a framework for disaster relief, called Personal Evacuation And Rescue (PEAR) System. The PEAR system meets all the requirements of being an ideal emergency evacuation system. It is not only an effective alert information dissemination system, but also a pervasive and efficient emergency evacuation system. PEAR is a programable system whose multimedia contents can be always up-to-date. By utilizing wireless technologies and smart mobile devices, PEAR can save more people by providing most intuitive, timely, localized and cooperative evacuation routes for either indoor or outdoor evacuation.