Multi-Occupant Movement Tracking in Smart Home Environments

Recognizing the movement and activities of an individual in an indoor space is a key functionality of smart homes, as a prerequisite to providing services in support of the occupant. Focusing on the particular case of smart homes with multiple occupants, we developed a location-and-movement recognition method using many inexpensive passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors and, a small number of, more costly RFID readers. In our method, PIR sensors, placed throughout the space, recognize movement while RFID readers, placed in key locations, recognize tags worn by individuals as they pass through their coverage area. The RFID readings are used to disambiguate the trajectories constructed based on PIR sensor readings. We evaluate through simulations the effectiveness of our method under different occupancy conditions.