Near Real-time Occupancy Detection for Smart Building Emergency Management: A Prototype

Occupancy detection plays an important role in smart buildings from energy-comfort management as well as emergency management perspectives. Occupancy detection system in emergency situations needs to be more proactive, real-time with low latency and high accuracy as compared to that required for energy-comfort management. Such occupancy detection information can help first responders to plan the rescue operations better. In this paper, an open source architecture of a Wi-Fi localization-based occupancy detection system prototype for emergency management in smart buildings is presented. Design, implementation and testing procedures for this system are detailed. A simulator build for performance testing has been described. The results of the testing are discussed from its realtime performance and accuracy perspective.