A case study on a distributed IoT system for indoor disaster preparedness in operational environments

Indoor environments are increasingly exposed to natural hazards, posing significant challenges for ensuring both preparedness and effective emergency response. However, existing monitoring solutions typically address either routine environmental control or post-event analysis, lacking mechanisms for dynamic reconfiguration across operational conditions. This paper presents a distributed IoT system for indoor disaster preparedness and response, grounded in an operational framework that provides a unified rationale for analyzing and managing indoor living environments. The proposed system integrates environmental and structural sensing, edge-level event detection, and cloud coordination services to enable continuous monitoring under normal conditions and coordinated reconfiguration during emergencies. A dual-regime operational model distinguishes preparedness and response phases, enabling state transitions triggered by critical events. The system is evaluated through a six-month real-world deployment in an educational environment, which provides qualitative and quantitative evidence of its behavior under operational conditions, and through controlled laboratory tests to assess its dual-regime behavior. The results show that the proposed system supports operational awareness and the reconfiguration of coordinated behavior in indoor environments.