Sherlock: Capturing Probe Requests for Automatic Presence Detection

The ubiquity of smartphones creates great opportunities for participatory sensing, where people can implicitly contribute observations about their local environments through sensors such as cameras and accelerometers. The collected data can then be aggregated and used to benefit the crowd in some way. In this paper, we report on the current development of Sherlock, a device capable of automatically detecting the presence of people in localities through evidences left by smartphones called probe requests, without any user intervention. To validate the proposed mechanism implemented in the device, we performed an experiment with ten participants in six rounds where it was possible to automatically detect 41 presence events, of which 66% could be detected within less than 30s. The implicit crowdsourcing mechanism behind this approach may allow real-time monitoring of people flows in public environments, which can enable, among other things, energy systems to be automatically orchestrated according to demand, reducing associated costs.