Monitoring human body motions during earthquakes

Abstract

This work aims at establishing laboratory requirements and testing conditions in order to understand the physical and emotional stability of people during a ground shaking. Several individuals with different human characteristics (gender, age, height, etc.) are considered in the test. Two different laboratory setups are presented. A position device (Kinect) and video targetless tracking algorithm has been used to collect the human body position during the shaking. A two and a three dimensional shaking tables are used to generate artificial earthquakes with different frequency bands. In addition, a well detailed virtual reality setting is applied to the testing site in order to illustrate the real environment. During the experiment, a special attention has been given to the factor of “surprise”, which is necessary to ensure a natural reaction of the individuals. The result of the experiment proved common behaviors among the individual samples during the shaking. This work is considered a first step towards a large test campaign, which is necessary to obtain comprehensive statistics on this topic.