Small Scale Deployment of Seat Occupancy Detectors

In this paper, we present the results of a small-scale field deployment of our capacitance-based seat occupancy detector [1]. We deployed our sensors to 36 seats in our university library and measured the performance of our system over a period of 8 weeks. As part of this deployment, we had to tackle numerous real-world deployment issues such as hardware failure, variations in signal quality, and interference caused by multiple objects in near proximity. We present our overall system design, along with the modifications we made to tackle various real-world problems. Finally, we present the results of our deployment which showed that our system achieves a reasonably high level of accuracy at 91.2%.