Best paper on device-free human sensing
Dr Sai Pai won the best paper award at the 1st ACM International Workshop on Device-Free Human Sensing for his paper on evaluating floor vibrations for building occupant localisation.
Postdoctoral researcher Dr Sai Pai won the best paper award at the 1st ACM International Workshop on Device-Free Human Sensing. Held in New York during 10 - 14 November 2019, the workshop is part of the ACM BuildSys 2019: Conference on systems for energy-efficient buildings, cities and transportation. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) BuildSys is the leading conference for research on systems for energy-efficient built environments.
In the winning paper external page Is there a relationship between footstep-impact locations and measured signal characteristics?, characteristics of floor vibrations were evaluated in order to assess their potential to perform model-based occupant localisation.
Building utilisation can be enhanced by tracking occupants. Non-intrusive tracking of occupants using floor-vibration measurements is beneficial for many smart-building applications such as energy consumption, security enhancement, and care-giving.
This study found that structural elements have a significant influence on measured floor vibrations due to footstep impacts. However, current methodologies for interpreting floor vibrations do not account for the varying floor stiffness due to structural elements such as beams, columns and walls.
Empirical analyses of a full-scale case study were conducted to determine signal characteristics that provide information regarding occupant location. Using a sensitivity analysis, several signal characteristics are suggested for occupant localisation.
As solutions to interpreting measurement data are sensitive to presence of uncertainties from multiple sources, incorporating measurement uncertainty and uncertainty from occupant gait will improve occupant localisation. This paper was co-authored with Dr Yves Reuland, Slah Drira and Prof. Ian Smith.
Postdoctoral researcher Dr Sai Pai and principal investigator Prof. Ian Smith are part of the Cyber Civil Infrastructure project at the Future Cities Laboratory.