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Domain-specific sensor deployments are critical to enabling various IoT applications. Existing solutions for quickly deploying sensing systems require significant amount of work and time, even for experienced engineers. We propose LegoSENSE, a low-cost open-source and modular platform, built on top of the widely popular Raspberry Pi single-board computer, that makes it simple for anyone to rapidly set up and deploy a customized sensing solution for application specific IoT deployments. In addition, the ‘plug and play’ and ‘mix and match’ functionality of LegoSENSE makes the sensor modules reusable, and allows them to be mixed and matched to serve a variety of needs. We show, through a series of user studies, that LegoSENSE enables users without engineering background to deploy a wide range of applications up to 9 × faster than experienced engineers without the use of LegoSENSE. We open-source the hardware and software designs to foster an ever-evolving community, enabling IoT applications for enthusiasts, students, scientists, and researchers across various application domains with or without prior experiences with embedded platforms or coding. 

The fast development of electric vehicles (EV) and EV chargers introduces many factors that affect the grid. EV charging and charge scheduling also bring challenges to EV drivers and grid operators. In this work, we propose a human-centric, data-driven, city-scale, multivariate optimization approach for the EV-interfaced grid. This approach takes into account user historical driving and charging habits, user preferences, EV characteristics, city-scale mobility, EV charger availability and price, and grid capacity. The user preferences include the trade-off between cost and time to charge, as well as incentives to participate in different energy-saving programs. We leverage deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to make recommendations to EV drivers and optimize their welfare while enhancing grid performance. 

Cardiopulmonary ailments are a major cause of mortality. Stethoscopes are one of the most important tools that healthcare professionals use to screen patients for a variety of ailments, especially those related to the heart and lungs. Despite the growth of digital stethoscopes on the market, it takes years of training to properly use stethoscopes to listen for abnormal sounds within the body. In this demonstration, we present an intelligent stethoscope platform that makes stethoscopes more accessible to the general population. Our platform utilizes augmented reality (AR) to provide real-time guidance on where to properly place the stethoscope on the body, enabling the general population to screen themselves for ailments. 

In this demonstration, in collaboration with licensed therapists, we introduce an AI therapist that takes advantage of the smart-home environment to screen day-to-day functioning and infer mental wellness of an occupant. Our system can assess a user's daily functioning and mental wellness based on a combination of direct conversation with users and information obtained from smart home devices using psychological rubrics proposed in [1]. We demonstrate that our system can converse with a user in a natural way (through a smartphone or smart speaker) and analyze a user's response semantically and sentimentally. In addition, we show that our system can provide preliminary interventions to help improve the user's wellness. In particular, when abnormal behavior is detected during the conversation or by smart home devices, the system provides psychotherapeutic consolations during the conversation and will check on the occupant's condition by actuating a home robot. 

There has been an immense growth in sensors, actuators, and smart devices in recent years, which enable us to better sense, actuate, and understand the physical world. Despite this growth, we have yet to achieve fully intelligent environments. This is, in part, due to the large number of different organizations creating smart devices with proprietary technologies and communication protocols that are not compatible with each other and require significant engineering to incorporate and adapt to specific applications. In this work, we present an easy-to-install and low-cost embedded platform that allows users to rapidly configure a mixture of sensors and actuators. The system is based on the commonly-used Raspberry Pi ecosystem, easily configurable, and does not require users to have prior knowledge of programming, which allows anyone, regardless of background, to use. We also introduce a battery-powered wireless extension module that is suitable for mobile drone applications, where a chord-powered Raspberry Pi is not suitable. We demonstrate the impact our system has on enabling drones with flexible sensing modalities and creating smarter environments by integrating our platform into a variety of intelligent home applications. 

With the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, ventilation indoors is becoming increasingly important in preventing the spread of airborne viruses. However, while sensors exist to measure wind speed and airflow gradients, they must be manually held by a human or an autonomous vehicle, robot, or drone that moves around the space to build an airflow map of the environment. In this demonstration, we present DAE, a novel drone-based system that can automatically navigate and estimate air flow in a space without the need of additional sensors attached onto the drone. DAE directly utilizes the flight controller data that all drones use to self-stabilize in the air to estimate airflow. DAE estimates airflow gradients in a room based on how the flight controller adjusts the motors on the drone to compensate external perturbations and air currents, without the need for attaching additional wind or airflow sensors. 

Recent years have witnessed the increasing penetration of wireless charging base stations in the workplace and public areas, such as airports and cafeterias. Such an emerging wireless charging infrastructure has presented opportunities for new indoor localization and identification services for mobile users. In this paper, we present QID, the first system that can identify a Qi-compliant mobile device during wireless charging in real-time. QID extracts features from the clock oscillator and control scheme of the power receiver and employs light-weight algorithms to classify the device. QID adopts a 2-dimensional motion unit to emulate a variety of multi-coil designs of Qi, which allows for fine-grained device fingerprinting. Our results show that QID achieves high recognition accuracy. With the prevalence of public wireless charging stations, our results also have important implications for mobile user privacy. 

We present SoFIT, an easily-deployed and privacy-preserving camera network system for occupant tracking. Unlike traditional camera network-based systems, SoFIT does not require a person to calibrate the network or provide real-world references. This enables anyone, including non-professionals, to install SoFIT. Once installed, SoFIT automatically localizes cameras within the network and generates the floor map leveraging movements of people using the space in daily life, before using the floor map and camera locations to track occupants throughout the environment. We demonstrate through a series of deployments that SoFIT can localize cameras with less than 4.8cm error, generate floor maps with 85% similarity to actual floor maps, and track occupants with less than 7.8cm error. 

With the recent societal impact of COVID-19, companies and government agencies alike have turned to thermal camera based skin temperature sensing technology to help screen for fever. However, the cost and deployment restrictions limit the wide use of these thermal sensing technologies. In this work, we present SIFTER, a low-cost system based on a RGB-thermal camera for continuous fever screening of multiple people. This system detects and tracks heads in the RGB and thermal domains and constructs thermal heat map models for each tracked person, and classifies people as having or not having fever. SIFTER can obtain key temperature features of heads in-situ at a distance and produce fever screening predictions in real-time, significantly improving screening through-put while minimizing disruption to normal activities. In our clinic deployment, SIFTER measurement error is within 0.4°F at 2 meters and around 0.6°F at 3.5 meters. In comparison, most infrared thermal scanners on the market costing several thousand dollars have around 1°F measurement error measured within 0.5 meters. SIFTER can achieve 100% true positive rate with 22.5% false positive rate without requiring any human interaction, greatly outperforming our baseline [1], which sees a false positive rate of 78.5%.