Abstract
This paper introduces a calibration-free footstep frequency estimation system using footstep-induced structural vibration. Footstep frequency is an important measure for tracking health status in senior/health care and rehabilitation. Using structural vibrations for this estimation can improve intrusiveness commonly associated with long-term monitoring. Because the large number of structure types and the variety of noise they are subjected to, the main challenges of vibration-based approach are: (1) separating footsteps from other impulsive excitations (such as door shutting, cane striking, object droppings, etc.), (2) providing a system which is compatible to different structures and does not require calibration and training for every structure. To combat these challenges, we introduce an online footstep frequency estimation system which uses human walking pattern heuristics to automatically separate and tune the system to distinguish between footstep-induced vibration and other impulsive excitations in different structures. We validate our approach in two different buildings with human participants. The results show that our approach results in F1 score of 0.87, equal to 8× improvement compared to a baseline approach, which classifies the footsteps using a model trained in a different structure.
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© 2017 The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc.
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Mirshekari, M., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y. (2017). Calibration-Free Footstep Frequency Estimation Using Structural Vibration. In: Caicedo, J., Pakzad, S. (eds) Dynamics of Civil Structures, Volume 2 . Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54777-0_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54777-0_35
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