Vish's Lab Notebook

9/13/22: First Meeting with TA

In our first meeting with our TA, we made some introductions and gave her our pitch for the project proposal. Our TA said she did a similar project during her time as an undergraduate in ECE 445, but they used a very different approach with ultrasonic sensors instead. She gave us some advice on our project such as just purchasing a Wi-Fi module instead of trying to build one ourselves.

9/16/22: Meeting with Jack Blevins

Jack is an alum from the ECE Department and took some particular interest into our project as he thought it was very interesting. We met with him and gave our pitch for the project as well. He was definitely very invested in our project and gave some thoughtful feedback. He gave us an interesting scenario where the microcontrollers would be placed in neighboring rooms. He told us to find a work-around to account for the fact that the signals from one room could be actually reaching the microcontroller in the other room and vice-versa. This would give an inaccurate count of the number of people in the room as the signals would be counted twice.

9/17/22: Identifying signals from only phones

We were initially planning to capture signals from all devices emitting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals. However, I thought a more accurate count of the number of people in a room might be just identifying the signals from mobile phones instead. Since most people carry only one phone this would be a lot more accurate. I found a recent paper on this topic where researchers talk about identifying whether the device is a mobile phone from the Bluetooth signal that it is emitting. Here is an article summarizing this as well. Phones transmit a signal called Bluetooth beacons with an average rate of 500 beacons per minute. If our microcontrollers can somehow identify and isolate the signals that are giving about 500 beacons per minute, then we would be able to identify that the device is a phone. This method, however, might come with its own ethical considerations as it is actively trying to fingerprint and track the device as a phone.