WiCPD: Wireless Child Presence Detection System for Smart Cars

Child presence detection (CPD) is becoming a regulatory requirement for car manufacturers to save children’s lives when they are left alone in unattended vehicles. However, most of the existing solutions require dedicated devices and suffer from limited accuracy and coverage. In this article, we build WiCPD, the first-of-its-kind in-car CPD system using commodity Wi-Fi, which can cover the entire interior of a car with no blind spot. First, we introduce a statistical electromagnetic model which accounts for the impact of motion on all the multipaths inside a car, followed by a motion statistics metric indicating the ambient motion intensity and a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) boosting scheme to extract the minute chest movement. Then, we design a unified CPD framework consisting of three target detector modules, including a motion target detector to detect a child in motion/awake, a stationary target detector to detect a stationary/sleeping child, and a transition target detector to detect a sleeping child with sporadic motion who is missed by both the motion and stationary target detectors. We implement a real-time WiCPD system by using commercial Wi-Fi chipsets, deploy it over 20 different cars, and collect data for multiple children aging from 4 to 50 months. The results show that WiCPD can achieve 100% detection rate within 8 s when the child is awake/in-motion and 96.56% detection rate within 20 s for a static/sleeping child. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that WiCPD can be easily deployed in minutes without calibration and enjoys very low CPU and memory consumption, thus promising a practical candidate for CPD applications.