# Building Fire Evacuation: An IoT-Aided Perspective in the 5G Era
## 6 Discussion  
The currently proposed IoT-aided building fire evacuation provided a possible approach for turning the building fire evacuation smart. By integrating the promising technologies of IoT, BIM, and 5G into fire emergency response and building evacuation, it is believed that a more effective and efficient building fire evacuation mode can be achieved, and more lives can be saved. However, to deploy such a system in practice, there may still be some difficulties. One of the important aspects is that its effectiveness and reliability may be a great concern to fire authorities. Even though 5G and other existing wireless communication networks provide a much simpler and flexible way to support various IoT use cases in built environments, there still needs to be more evidence to convince that the effectiveness and reliability of wireless sensors (e.g., fire detector, fire alarm) can be ensured and meet the requirements of current regulations of fire detection and fire alarm systems in terms of various fire situations. In addition, the interoperation of IoT devices between different vendors is also a problem. Currently, the IoT industry has no widely adopted data standards that IoT vendors can conform to, which makes it difficult to integrate the diversified sources of data in buildings into one platform. Therefore, in terms of the legislation control for IoT-aided building fire evacuation in the future, specific information needs, means of data transmission, and data interoperability should be stipulated by authorities. Furthermore, the stipulation of the construction of IoT-aided building fire evacuation systems should run through its whole life cycle, including the system design along with the building design in the design phase, implementation of the system in the building construction stage, and specific system operation and data management requirements in the operation phase.  
In addition to acquiring the fire hazard information and occupants' situations on the fire-ground inside buildings, the currently proposed IoT-aided building fire evacuation also expects to employ the collected information to assist occupant evacuation with a dynamic adjustment of evacuation strategies via various modern information and communication technologies (ICT). Therefore, people's responses in such critical situations in connection to modern ICT or their adaptability to real-time evacuation guidance may play important roles in the successful operation of the system. Previous research conducted under an international survey and a full-scale evacuation trial [100,101] demonstrated that the active dynamic direction-changing signage systems indeed have their effectiveness in real evacuation scenarios. In addition, the effectiveness of public displays providing dynamic directions for crowd evacuation was also convinced in a large-scale football stadium scenario with simulations [102]. As for the usability of smartphones in providing dynamic evacuation strategy notification to evacuees, a study by [PERSON] et al. [103] showed that people might have limited cognitive capacity when using mobile phones under stress. However, most of the experimental participants believed that the mobile phone is somewhat useful to their evacuations. From the previous research, it is believed that occupants can be adapted to the evacuation mode proposed by the IoT-aided building fire evacuation system, and the IoT-aided building fire evacuation has the potential to become a game-changer in future building fire emergency response and evacuation.