Patent ID: 7865512

Claim:
A method for providing information about the possible location of victims within a building during an emergency situation, the method being implemented by a monitoring system, the method comprising: receiving data from embedded systems that are located within a building, wherein the data comprises data from a controller system for the building indicating whether a particular device has been turned on or off; defining rules for interpreting the data, wherein each rule comprises: a triggering event, wherein the triggering event includes an action by a building occupant, wherein the action by the building occupant comprises: opening or closing a door, or turning on or turning off a device, or plugging in or unplugging a device, or turning a light on or turning a light off, or the occupant moving within the building; and one or more actions that are performed in response to the triggering event; interpreting the data based on the defined rules to obtain location information that comprises possible locations of victims within the building, wherein the possible locations of victims are based upon the actions by the building occupant; storing the location information in a database automatically based on the actions of the building occupant, wherein the location information for a particular room comprises either a first value or a second value, wherein the first value indicates that the room is likely occupied and the second value indicates that the room is likely not occupied; providing the location information to one or more emergency response systems; receiving notification about the occurrence of an emergency event; in response to the notification, notifying the one or more emergency response systems about the emergency event; and modifying behavior of the monitoring system based on the occurrence of the emergency event.