Development of An Intelligent Alert System for Ensuring Social Distancing in Public Waiting Spaces

Community involvement is critical in preventing virus outbreaks, notably through adherence to health measures such as physical distancing. This work proposes an automatic warning system for waiting seats designed to facilitate the implementation of physical distancing protocols in community activity centers. Manual monitoring techniques are insufficient for continually monitoring waiting seat occupancy, necessitating an automated solution. The suggested system detects objects on chairs by integrating load cells and ultrasonic sensors, while fuzzy logic algorithms efficiently select which seats can be filled. By accurately identifying the seat that is occupied first by the user, the system can display indicators to indicate which seats cannot be occupied. Experiment results demonstrate the system’s effectiveness, where the system has an error rate of 0.66%. Furthermore, the system promptly displays LED indicators for each chair, with an average delay of 0.93 seconds. Through the implementation of this automated warning system, community centers can effectively promote physical distancing, contributing to the prevention of virus transmission.