FaceLock Homes: A Contactless Smart Home Security System to Prevent COVID Transmission

Smart home security and safety systems have gained more importance in recent years. This is attributable to their significant impact in reducing and preventing loss of assets and human life. The COVID-19 pandemic adds a new dimension to home security as potentially infected people or those not taking necessary precautions such as sanitization or wearing masks may enter homes and cause further transmission. The traditional security systems are effective in conventional scenarios but require human intervention and contact which can lead to the spread of the virus. This necessitates the development of smart security systems that are autonomous and contactless. This paper presents a novel IoT enabled home security system that restricts unauthorized access and at the same time ensures that permitted users are normothermic and are following proper COVID hygiene. The proposed system is a smart edge device that does not require a cloud platform for its computational needs. Facial recognition is used to authenticate and allow approved users to get access. If an unfamiliar person tries to enter the premises, the system takes a photo, computes mask detection on the image, measures temperature and sends these three data points as a WhatsApp notification to the administrative user. The door lock can then be controlled automatically or remotely using a WhatsApp bot.