Researchers have unveiled a groundbreaking smart floor tile designed to enhance crowd monitoring without relying on an external power source. A team headed by Junrui Liang created this groundbreaking tile. Only 15 millimeters in thickness, it leverages state of the art technology to provide a highly accurate count of pedestrians and the direction they’re walking.
The embedded smart tile uses batteryless quasi-static-toggling (QST) electromagnetic harvesters enabling it to work without batteries. This energy-efficient design makes it especially appropriate for applications in high-use, urban settings where public safety is key.
In extensive testing, the tile achieved an impressive overall success rate of 94.8 percent in counting people and determining their movement direction. Of these counts, the researchers documented 714 true counts, 35 counts that were missed, and only 2 counts in the wrong travel direction.
What the intelligent floor tile is best at is identification of direction of travel. Its sensitivity to the way people walk is what makes that possible. It senses the heel touching down first, then the ball of the foot and toes. This sophisticated mechanism is what enables it to achieve such high accuracy even in different environments and settings.
In tightly controlled experimental conditions, the widely adopted tile performed underwhelmingly. With an overall success rate of 97.4 percent, regardless of if someone passed over it at a slow or fast pace. “Even during running, the success rate remained at 92.6 percent,” Liang noted, highlighting the tile’s effectiveness in high-speed scenarios.
Even with these many successes, the researchers recognized many of the project’s limitations. And quite remarkably, most of these tragic failures occurred during peak travel periods. These trips were most prevalent when individuals moved at a brisk pace or walked near the corners of the tiles. Any footstep that was even slightly off-center such that it didn’t engage all four sensor modules provided catchy potential for error.
For ease of use and data transfer, the smart floor tile integrates Bluetooth transmission technology available in a very short range of 10 meters. This requires that data receivers be located within range of the tile to ensure smooth and effective data transfer.
To put the tile to the best test, researchers combat-tested the smart tile under real-world conditions by departing and entering through their lab entrance. They employed video recording to confirm precision for a complete 120-hour stretch. This methodology proved its usefulness in real world applications such as monitoring pedestrian traffic flow.
Public safety disasters involving mass gatherings of vulnerable pedestrian populations happen from time to time around the world, especially in big cities, Liang stated. He advocated for practical solutions in prioritizing pedestrian traffic. Thus, we imagined a few different creative solutions to better capture pedestrian traffic flow, one of which is the battery-free floor tile.
