Refinement of the quantitative models to estimate user's fear in evacuation route planning: A study on the effectiveness of physical factors for signboards

During disaster evacuation, fear or panic can force evacuees to make irrational decisions. The final goal of our project is the development of a navigation system that provide routes where evacuees go through reassured. The aim of this study is identification of additional factors, along routes to improve the fear estimation model. A questionnaire survey was conducted to seek capable candidates of additional factors, and “size of the largest signboards” was selected as a new candidate. The second step was validation of the factors and the model through a cognitive experiment. 360-degree videos and a head-mounted display was used to display the images to the participants. The effectiveness of the new fear factor “size of the largest signboard” and creating a model group by segmentation were confirmed. The two modifications reduced the root mean square error of the fear estimation by 4.7% from the result without them. Also, the mean absolute error of the estimation decreased 8.6%. It is expected that the pedestrian navigation system based on the proposed method can provide routes where users can evacuate reassured, avoiding places where they may feel great fears.