Sherlock Homes : Towards Practical Person Tracking in Homes
Abstract:
Knowledge of a person’s whereabouts in the home is essential for many context-aware applications such as personalized heating and cooling, entertainment, task assistance and behavioral or health analysis. Despite these benefits, many people do not want cameras in their living spaces (because of privacy concerns) or to carry or wear a tag or mobile device at all times in the home (as people tend to forget to carry, wear or charge the device). In our research, we propose to build Sherlock Homes, an indoor tracking system that aims to track people in homes at a decimeter-level in a more practical manner. More specifically, Sherlock Homes aims to be a tracking system which is device-free, privacy-preserving, low-power, easy to deploy, makes no assumptions on the number of people in a home or about guests frequenting homes. Our preliminary results demonstrate that we can track people more accurately than state-of-the-art, in homes at a room-level granularity based on body-shape. Our proposed research extends our preliminary work to track people at much lower power (potentially energy-harvestable) and at a decimeter-level granularity based on ultrasound signals from smart-devices.
Committee Members:
Kamin Whitehouse (Advisor), John Stankovic (Chair), Brad Campbell, Gabriel Robins, Robert M. Weikle II (Minor Representative)