An Empirical Design Space Analysis of Doorway Tracking Systems for Real-World Environments

Doorway tracking systems track people’s room location by instrumenting the doorways rather than instrumenting the rooms themselves—resulting in fewer sensors and less monitoring while still providing location information on occupants. In this article, we explore what is required to make doorway tracking a practical solution. We break a doorway tracking system into multiple independent design components, including both sensor and algorithmic design. Informed by this design, we construct a doorway tracking system and analyze how different combinations of these design components affect tracking accuracy. We perform a six-day in situ study in a ten-room house with two volunteers to analyze how these design components respond to the natural types and frequencies of errors in a real-world setting. To reflect the needs of different application classes, we analyze these design components using three different evaluation metrics: room accuracy, duration accuracy, and transition accuracy. Results indicate that doorway tracking can achieve 99.5% room accuracy on average in controlled settings and 96% room accuracy in in situ settings. This is contrasted against the 76% in situ setting room accuracy of Doorjamb, a doorway tracking system whose design implements only a limited number of components in our proposed doorway tracking system design space. We describe the differences between the data in the in situ and controlled settings, and provide guidelines about how to design a doorway tracking system for a given application’s accuracy requirements.