Privacy preserving infrared sensor array based indoor location awareness

Abstract

In recent years, researches on smart environments (SEs) especially smart homes for senior care have attracted great attention. One important issue in constructing such kind of SEs is privacy, because the target environment (e.g. a home or a room) is not public space, and devices like video cameras cannot be used. For individual or personal spaces, the SE should not be too smart to invade the resident's privacy. The objective of this study is to establish a technology for constructing privacy preserving SEs. This technology will be a core for supporting our daily lives. Our solution is to use an array of some homogeneous sensors (e.g. infrared sensor) to detect various daily activities with an accuracy just good for supporting the residents. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of location awareness using an array containing 10 infrared sensors. Experimental results show that the array can provide enough information for recognizing the locations, and various classifiers can be used to recognize the locations with a relatively high accuracy.