STTR Phase I: True Presence Occupancy Detection Sensors (TruePODS)

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will extend to a number of interdisciplinary areas in science and engineering. In particular the areas of wireless sensors, wireless smart sensor network, transducer technology, and signal processing will be the primary beneficiaries. The development of this new technology for efficient indoor sensing, and development of new algorithms for occupancy sensing techniques, will have immediate implications in the building automation and home construction industries, where improved occupancy sensing is necessary to achieve the promise of ?smart buildings? that adjust environmental conditions such as lighting and temperature automatically to suit the needs of the occupants. In addition to "smart building"/energy efficiency applications there are also significant opportunities to apply these highly-reliable and difficult-to-defeat sensors to facility security, military, law enforcement/correctional facilities and in-home care monitoring. The team will explore the potential commercialization of the technology, showing how these unique sensors provide important new capabilities in each of these sizable and rapidly growing markets. This Small Business Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project will develop True Presence Occupancy Detection Sensors (TruePODS) for indoor spaces that employ Doppler radar technology to detect true human presence, by adding passive nodes on off-the-shelf low-power system-on-chip (SoC) platform. These low-cost, high-efficiency, and novel occupancy sensors integrate the capabilities of sensing, processing and communications in a single device, thus providing the key to small, low-cost, and low-power wireless sensor unit for zero energy ?smart buildings? by reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy efficiency. The work will demonstrate how such sensor units can be used to detect and report the true presence and activity of humans even while motions of appliances, such as rotating fans, are present, which generally will falsely set off conventional sensors, and subjects are motionless or sleeping, providing a highly-reliable low-power occupancy sensor for indoor spaces. TruePODS integrate sensing, processing, communications capabilities in a single low-cost device, providing an ideal platform for ?Smart Building? applications.