Social Distancing Compliance Monitoring for COVID-19 Recovery Through Footstep-Induced Floor Vibrations

Monitoring the compliance of social distancing is critical for schools and offices to recover in-person operations in indoor spaces from the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing systems focus on vision- and wearable-based sensing approaches, which require direct line-of-sight or device-carrying and may also raise privacy concerns. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new monitoring system for social distancing compliance based on footstep-induced floor vibration sensing. This system is device-free, non-intrusive, and perceived as more privacy-friendly. Our system leverages the insight that footsteps closer to the sensors generate vibration signals with larger amplitudes. The system first estimates the location of each person relative to the sensors based on signal energy and then infers the distance between two people. We evaluated the system through a real-world experiment with 8 people, and the system achieves an average accuracy of 97.8% for walking scenario classification and 80.4% in social distancing violation detection.