Mobile sensing of pedestrian flocks in indoor environments using WiFi signals

In Pervasive Computing research, substantial work has been directed towards radio-based sensing of human movement patterns. This research has, however, mainly been focused on movements of individuals. This paper addresses the joint identification of the movement indoors of multiple persons forming a cohesive whole - specifically flocks - with clustering approaches operating on three different feature sets derived from WiFi signals which are comparatively analysed. Automatic detection of flocks has several important applications, including social and psychological sensing and emergency research studies. We use a dataset comprising 16 subjects forming one to four flocks walking in a building on single and multiple floors. For the detection of flocks we achieved an average F-measure accuracy of up to 85 percent. We report on the advantages and drawbacks of the three different types of feature sets considering their suitability for use “in the wild” or in well-defined environments.