Real-Time Indoor Localization in Smart Homes Using Ultrasound Technology

Abstract

Countries around the world are facing an important ageing of their population, leading to medical staff shortages for homecare. With the development of smart homes, cognitively impaired inhabitants could benefit from the help of new adapted technologies in order to assist them in their daily activities. The first step to assisting humans in need comes with the need to detect their position in their home. In this paper, we introduce an innovative use of the ultrasound technology using round-trip time-of-flight (RTOF) based hardware as a mean to measure the position of people in their home. An implementation is described along with an experimentation showing its precision and the promising results in detecting both a static and a moving inhabitant.