An Open-Space Museum As a Testbed for Popularity Monitoring in Real-World Settings

An Open-Space Museum As a Testbed for Popularity Monitoring in Real-World Settings

Cattani, M. (TU Delft Embedded and Networked Systems)
Protonotarios, I. (TU Delft Embedded and Networked Systems)
Martella, Claudio (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
van Velzen, Joost (Salland Electronics)
Zuniga, Marco (TU Delft Embedded and Networked Systems)
Langendoen, K.G. (TU Delft Embedded and Networked Systems)

2017

This paper reports our experience with crowd monitoring technologies in the challenging real-world conditions of a modern, open-space museum. We seized the opportunity to use the NEMO science center as a testbed, and studied the effectiveness of neighborhood discovery and density estimation algorithms in a network formed by visitors wearing bracelets emitting RF beacons. The diverse set of conditions (flash crowds in open spaces vs. single person booths) revealed three interesting findings: (i) state-of-the-art density estimation fails in 80% of the cases, (ii) RSS-based classifiers fail too, because their underlying assumptions do not hold in many scenarios, and (iii) neighborhood discovery can obtain exact information in an energy-efficient way, provided that static and mobile nodes are differentiated to filter out “passers by” clobbering the true popularity of an exhibit. The overall lesson from the experiment is that today’s algorithms are quite far from the ideal of monitoring popularity in a privacy-preserving and energy-efficient way with minimal infrastructure across the set of heterogeneous conditions encountered in practice.

Crowd monitoring
Density estimation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:486ed43b-a771-4624-b049-255cea47a6fe

Junction Publishing

978-0-9949886-1-4

Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks, EWSN 2017

EWSN 2017, 2017-02-20 → 2017-02-22, Uppsala, Sweden

EWSN 8217;17

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2017 M. Cattani, I. Protonotarios, Claudio Martella, Joost van Velzen, Marco Zuniga, K.G. Langendoen