Floor vibration type estimation with piezo sensor toward indoor positioning system

These days, smart home applications such as a concierge service for residents, home appliance control and so on are attracting attention. In order to realize these applications, we strongly believe that we need an indoor positioning system which fulfills the following requirements: Req 1: high accuracy; Req 2: low installation cost; Req 3: small burden on the user; Req 4: low privacy invasion. There are several studies which work on the indoor positioning system. However, these previous works do not accomplish the requirements. In this paper, we present a piezo sensor-based indoor positioning system which estimates the position of the user by utilizing a piezo component attached on the floor. To realize the proposed positioning system, we have tackled two challenges. First challenge is the development of an indoor positioning technique. We cannot utilize TDoA technique that is used to estimate the distance from the target, since the calculation of vibration velocity is difficult. To cope with this challenge, we have developed a new technique which estimates the position of the user from floor vibrations caused by their actions. Second challenge is the selection of the feature vector to estimate the vibration type accurately. We have selected MFCC, FFT, and Envelope shape features from preliminary experiments. We have implemented the proposed system in our smart home testbed. We have evaluated the performance of the vibration type estimation technique. As a result, we have confirmed that our technique estimates the type with F-measure: 93.9%.