BreathEasy: Exploring the Potential of Acoustic Sensing for Healthy Indoor Environments

Abstract

The exploration of our envisioned system, BreathEasy, offers the alternative utilization of ambient acoustic sensing techniques to promote user awareness and ensure healthy indoor environments. There has been a renewed interest in providing optimal ventilation indoors after the pandemic. While increasing ventilation at all times leads to high energy consumption, prior work uses occupancy-based or air quality-based approaches to modulate ventilation. However, risk assessment is very complex and requires information about activities performed by occupants, space distribution among occupants, and wearing of masks, on top of other indoor environmental factors such as ventilation rate, air filtration, and room dimensions. Here, we investigate the feasibility of using acoustic sensing mechanisms to produce key parameters essential for airborne transmission risk assessment of occupants in indoor spaces.