Indoor people localization and tracking using an energy harvesting smart floor

In the recent years, different kind of intelligent floors have been proposed but they are expensive and in many cases difficult to install and manage. In this paper, we previously describe the state of the art concerning smart floors designed to satisfy different applications and then we present an intelligent floor realized for localizing and tracking people in an indoor environment. The aim of this work is to propose an innovative smart floor based on an energy harvesting system able to allow the localization and analysis of the movement of the users in a specific space. The solution presented in this paper involves the use of capacitive sensors on a polymeric support to insert between solid wood and a wooden part of a floating parquet. The proposed system is part of HDOMO, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) project developing smart solutions for active aging. A detailed architecture of the smart floor is proposed together with a preliminary test phase.