Difficulties Encountered
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The core of the Smart Seats is to accurately monitor seat occupancy. Using one indicator can make the result prone to environmental and man-made disturbances. Thus, we used a combined indicator of temperature and movement to improve the accuracy.
We use Bluetooth as the primary means of connection between the Edison and the sensors. When one or two sensors are connected to the Edison at once, the data transmission experiences almost no delays and the system usually does not crash. However, when three or more sensors are connected, not only does each sensor's transmission lags behind, but the entire system is also considerably more prone to crashes, which stops the data collection altogether and forces the system to restart. |
Possible Future Work
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While the Smart Seats system works reliably in small scale, it has yet included the capability to monitor seating status for an entire library, mainly due to the unreliable Bluetooth links when multiple sensors are connected to one Edison, Further work can be done to scale up to improve the connection soundness or find other cost-effective solutions to monitor the seats.
In addition, we currently tape the sensors directly on the surface of each chair during the experimentation phase. This may cause slight discomfort for the occupants. If actual deployments are done for the system, the sensors should be non-obtrusively integrated with the chairs, without upsetting the accuracy of the detection algorithm. |