An RF doormat for tracking people's room locations

Abstract

Many occupant-oriented smarthome applications such as automated lighting, heating and cooling, and activity recognition need room location information of residents within a building. Surveillance based tracking systems used to track people in commercial buildings, are privacy invasive in homes. In this paper, we present the RF Doormat - a RF threshold system that can accurately track people's room locations by monitoring their movement through the doorways in the home. We also present a set of guidelines and a visualization to easily and rapidly setup the RF-Doormat system on any doorway. To evaluate our system, we perform 580 doorway crossings across 11 different doorways in a home. Results indicate that our system can detect doorway crossings made by people with an average accuracy of 98%. To our knowledge, the RF Doormat is the first highly accurate room location tracking system that can be used for long time periods without the need for privacy invasive cameras.