Distributed Sensor Network for Indirect Occupancy Measurement in Smart Buildings

Many areas like smart buildings, crowd flow, action recognition, and assisted living rely on occupancy information. Although the use of smart cameras can alleviate the problem and provide accurate occupancy information, at the same time it can be cost prohibitive, invasive and not easy to scale or generalize to different environments. An alternative solution should bring similar accuracy while minimizing the previous problems. This work presents a candidate wireless sensor network for indirect occupancy measurements in a smart building. A prototype was built, that consists of CO2, temperature and humidity sensors. The prototype was placed in a complex indoor environment to collect data for a week. Then, the data was analyzed to examine potential correlation between sensor data and occupancy information. According to experimental results, CO2 can be used for indirect occupancy measurements.