Doorpler: A radar-based system for real-time, low power zone occupancy sensing

Avinash Kalyanaraman, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Kamin Whitehouse

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Many homes today are logically or physically 'zoned' based on properties such as HVACs, activities, or physical layouts. Accurately sensing the occupancy of these zones can yield energy savings, aid in automatic heating and lighting control, energy disaggregation, etc. Existing systems that attempt to sense occupancy are power consuming, non real-time, pet unfriendly and/or sensitive to ambient heat, light and air flow. In this paper, we address these by building Doorpler, a time, space and power-aware radar-based system that detects occupancy at zone transition points by sensing crossings and their direction. It detects a crossing via the Doppler Principle, and infers the direction of crossing by measuring the angle-of-arrival of the human reflection. We evaluate Doorpler by conducting a scripted study and two in-situ studies for 200 hours, collecting over 1600 doorway crossings. We obtain a precision, recall and direction accuracy of over 99% in the scripted studies, and over 95% in the in-situ studies. Our results estimate that Doorpler can fall in the energy-harvestable range of indoor environments with an average power consumption of 6.1mW. With an execution time of 13.8ms, Doorpler has the potential to enable several real-time smart home applications like smart-lighting and HVAC control.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 25th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS 2019
EditorsBjorn B. Brandenburg
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages42-53
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781728106786
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event25th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Apr 16 2019Apr 18 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS
Volume2019-April
ISSN (Print)1545-3421

Conference

Conference25th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period4/16/194/18/19

Keywords

  • Doppler Effect
  • Occupancy Sensing
  • Radars
  • Smart Homes
  • Wireless Systems

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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