BLUESOUND: A New Resident Identification Sensor—Using Ultrasound Array and BLE Technology for Smart Home Platform

Activity recognition through ambient sensors in a smart home can efficiently monitor residents’ abnormal behaviors in daily life, while not adding extra burdens caused by wearable sensors. Monitoring and separating the activities of a specific individual in a multi-residential home is still, however, a significant challenge for these smart home applications. This paper proposes a new human identification sensor, which can efficiently differentiate multiple residents in a home environment to detect their height as a unique bio-feature. This sensor includes three sensing/communication modules: pyroelectric infrared (PIR) occupancy, ultrasound array, and bluetooth low energy (BLE) communication modules. The PIR occupancy module is used to detect the moving direction, while the ultrasound array module detects the moving residents’ height. The combination of these two sensing technologies can be used to then detect the moving velocity. The BLE advertising mode is then used to communicate these data to the data server. A new embedded algorithm increased the energy efficiency of this identification technology. A comprehensive modeling and experiments are done to assess the performance of this sensor and the results are provided.