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  1. In this paper, we present a multiple concurrent occupant identification approach through footstep-induced floor vibration sensing. Identification of human occupants is useful in a variety of indoor smart structure scenarios, with applications in building security, space allocation, and healthcare. Existing approaches leverage sensing modalities such as vision, acoustic, RF, and wearables, but are limited due to deployment constraints such as line-of-sight requirements, sensitivity to noise, dense sensor deployment, and requiring each walker to wear/carry a device. To overcome these restrictions, we use footstep-induced structural vibration sensing. Footstep-induced signals contain information about the occupants' unique gait characteristics, and propagate through the structural medium, which enables sparse and passive identification of indoor occupants. The primary research challenge is that multiple-person footstep-induced vibration responses are a mixture of structurally-codependent overlapping individual responses with unknown timing, spectral content, and mixing ratios. As such, it is difficult to determine which part of the signal corresponds to each occupant. We overcome this challenge through a recursive sparse representation approach based on cosine distance that identifies each occupant in a footstep event in the order that their signals are generated, reconstructs their portion of the signal, and removes it from the mixed response. By leveraging sparse representation, our approach can simultaneously identify and separate mixed/overlapping responses, and the use of the cosine distance error function reduces the influence of structural codependency on the multiple walkers' signals. In this way, we isolate and identify each of the multiple occupants' footstep responses. We evaluate our approach by conducting real-world walking experiments with three concurrent walkers and achieve an average F1 score for identifying all persons of 0.89 (1.3x baseline improvement), and with a 10-person "hybrid" dataset (simulated combination of single-walker real-world data), we identify 2, 3, and 4 concurrent walkers with a trace-level accuracy of 100%, 93%, and 73%, respectively, and observe as much as a 2.9x error reduction over a naive baseline approach. 
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  2. We present a passive and non-intrusive sensing system for monitoring hand washing activity using structural vibration sensing. Proper hand washing is one of the most effective ways to limit the spread and transmission of disease, and has been especially critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior approaches include direct observation and sensing-based approaches, but are limited in non-clinical settings due to operational restrictions and privacy concerns in sensitive areas such as restrooms. Our work introduces a new sensing modality for hand washing monitoring, which measures hand washing activity-induced vibration responses of sink structures, and uses those responses to monitor the presence and duration of hand washing. Primary research challenges are that vibration responses are similar for different activities, occur on different surfaces/structures, and tend to overlap/coincide. We overcome these challenges by extracting information about signal periodicity for similar activities through cepstrum-based features, leveraging hierarchical learning to differentiate activities on different surfaces, and denoting “primary/secondary” activities based on their relative frequency and importance. We evaluate our approach using real-world hand washing data across 4 different sink structures/locations, and achieve an average F1-score for hand washing activities of 0.95, which represents a 8.8X and 10.2X reduction in error over two different baseline approaches. 
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