Project Group 14: Door Tracker

Team name: 

MEJC

Team mentor:

Professor Pai Chou

Team members:

Margarette Catanghal (CSE)

Esther Poon (CSE)

Jaron Chen (EE)

Christopher Sherman (CSE)

Project Idea Introduction: 

Our project is an embedded device that includes a door tracker, a battery, a way to transfer data over a bluetooth connection, and a phone application to view the occupancy counts/movements/statistics, and perhaps power harvesting if time permits. This can be pursued by residents and owners. If used by residents it would most likely be easiest to have the device connected through bluetooth to the device in order to send info to the phone app. If done for owners, it could be done in the same way, but for situations like apartment buildings it gets tricky, since the range of the bluetooth will be limited. This however could be solved through software: owner accounts can be an option and their purpose will be to link the information from all individual occupants of the building who have the system.

The purpose of the device(s) is/are to provide information on the general whereabouts of people in a building. Any given building could either use a device for each entrance/exit or it can expand the network to include any hallway or room with a door. This information is useful because it can provide valuable statistical knowledge, basic security tracking, as well as possibly features of death and injury prevention. The statistical information could be used by businesses to help better understand their customers or employees. It could also be used by residents as a way to have time stamped movements in the case of a break in or robbery. Our devices’ most important purpose is to create a cost efficient network of sensors to report whether people are still in a building during an emergency. In cases where remaining occupants are unable to get out and/or need help, these sensors, together with the software to network them, could provide life saving information. It could show firefighters the whereabouts of the remaining people so the most effective plan can be determined and in cases where everyone has evacuated, it could prevent anyone from going in to check for people. So the system is not only flexible enough to appeal to multiple demographics and provide multiple uses, but is also cheaper and easier to setup than its, mostly wired, competitors.

This idea was thought up by Jaron while our group was brainstorming for project ideas. While we have made tweaks to the idea, we did and still do find this to be a solid project idea because of its plausibility under our constraints and, more importantly, its lifesaving potential for little cost. Although there have been projects that have worked with door trackers, as well as the increasingly popular devices that determine the number of cars in a parking lot and the number of available spaces left, we feel that our project offers a unique spin to human-tracking. One that is multi purposed and has a sizable real world impact.

This project offers a chance to work with many different technical skills and will require the integration of hardware and software parts of the system. We believe that we have the skills necessary to be able to meld together multiple aspects, such as communication between devices within the system, the network’s ability to identify the number of people within a certain location, the controlling of the power consumption, and transmission of data to external devices, such as mobile phones. With a diverse set of skills, we can see ourselves being able to complete this project by dividing up portions of the project properly. Since there is only one portion of the project that needs a hardware solution, Jaron plans on leading that effort. The other, software portions, will be divided up and worked on primarily by Margarette, Esther, and Christopher. These portions include embedded software for the door device, a phone application to interface with door tracker networks, and possibly a server application to handle data transmission. We may be unfamiliar with some of the new hardware components and how to write software for them, but with research and guidance from our mentor we will be able to learn these things while we work on the project.  

How We Innovated:

• Networked low power trackers through Wi-Fi
• More cost-effective than alternative technologies
• Provides wider range of applications than commercial competitors

Component Diagram:

Main Components:

Obstacles/Challenges:

• Ensuring that we could reach a certain level of sensitivity and specificity for the product
• Integrating all of the subsystems together
• Progressing around unfinished sections

Future Possibilities:

• Self-powered via power harvesting
• Bluetooth device recognition
• Emergency response
• Business analytics
• Smart home functionality integration

Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6x8_183e1M

Read more about our devolopment process and project by checking out our

Team's Weekly Blog: https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/mejc-weekly-blog/

Team's Presentation: 

https://docs.google.com/a/uci.edu/presentation/d/1cKuXtf_t-haKERu3f1wq0S-nSVU0DtMLGsL62e4dhyc/edit?usp=sharing