Monitoring building door events using barometer sensor in smartphones

Building security systems are commonly deployed to detect intrusion and burglary in home and business structures. Such systems can accurately detect door open/close events, but their high-cost of installation and maintenance makes them unsuitable for certain building monitoring applications, such as times of high/low entrance traffic, estimating building occupancy, etc.

In this paper, we show that barometer sensors found in latest smartphones can directly detect the building door open/close events anywhere inside an insulated building. The sudden pressure change observed by barometers is sufficient to detect events even in presence of user mobility (e.g. climbing stairs).

We study various characteristics of the pressure variation due to door events, and demonstrate that door open/close events can be recognized with an accuracy range of 99.34% -- 99.81% based on the data collected from 3 different buildings. Such a low-cost ubiquitous solution of door event detection enables many monitoring applications without any infrastructure integration, and it can also work as an augmentation to the existing expensive security systems.

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