Real-time Detection of Seat Occupancy and Hogging

• Main Authors: NGUYEN, Huy Hoang, GULATI, Nakul, LEE, Youngki, BALAN, Rajesh Krishna
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: capacitive sensing; occupancy detection; hogging detection; electric field sensing; inductive proximity sensing; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3118; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4118/viewcontent/p29_nguyen.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this paper, we propose a cheap and effective solution to detect if specific seats at a shared public table are occupied -- either by humans or by objects (i.e., the seats are being "hogged"). The hogging of seats, in particular, is a big problem for our campus library and required a large amount of manpower to correct (to find and clear hogged seats). We propose using two different cheap sensors, a capacitance sensor and an infrared (IR) sensor, to solve this problem. In the rest of this paper, we show how using these sensors can accurately determine if a seat is occupied by a human or empty. We then show that the capacitance sensor can also accurately distinguish between three different states; 1) seat is empty, 2) seat is occupied by a human, c) seat is empty, but table area at seat is occupied (by a book, laptop, etc. i.e., it is possibly hogged).