SST: Software Sonic Thermometer on Acoustic-Enabled IoT Devices

Abstract

Temperature is an important data source for weather forecasting, agriculture irrigation, anomaly detection, etc. While temperature measurement can be achieved via low-cost yet standalone hardware with reasonable accuracy, integrating thermal sensing into ubiquitous computing devices is highly non-trivial due to the design requirement for specific heat isolation and proper device layout. In this paper, we present the first integrated thermometer using commercial-off-the-shelf acoustic-enabled devices. Our software sonic thermometer (SST) utilizes on-board dual microphones on commodity mobile devices to estimate sound speed, which has a known relation with temperature. To precisely measure temperature via sound speed, we propose a chirp mixing approach to circumvent low sampling rates on commodity hardware and design a pipeline of signal processing blocks to handle channel distortions. SST, for the first time, empowers ubiquitous computing devices with thermal sensing capability. It is portable and cost-effective, making it competitive with current thermometers using dedicated hardware. SST is potential to facilitate many interesting applications such as large-scale distributed thermal sensing, yielding high temporal/spatial resolutions with unimaginable low costs. We implement SST on a commodity platform and results show that SST achieves a median accuracy of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${0.5^\circ \mathrm{C}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> even at varying humidity levels.