Investigating Novel Proximity Monitoring Techniques Using Ubiquitous Sensor Technology

Adam, S.; Coward, B.; Deberry, G.; Glazier, C.; Magnusson, E.; Boukhechba, M.

The goal of this work is to investigate novel proximity detection techniques by researching and testing various sensor technologies and investigate their feasibility in an athletic context. COVID-19 has challenged sports teams to come up with reasonable and easy-to-implement solutions to provide a safe training environment for their players and staff. For this reason, proximity data is more important than ever, as many teams are in need of a way to measure social distancing and maintain contact tracing of their athletes. Bluetooth has been widely used to detect colocation and monitor social distancing. However, there are many other sensing technologies that may prove to be more accurate, robust, and secure. Therefore, the focus of this work is to investigate how Bluetooth compares with ultra-wideband and ultrasound technologies when monitoring the distance between users. We have implemented and compared the three modalities in a controlled experiment to investigate their accuracy at detecting distance between users at various levels. Our results indicate that the UWB signals are the most accurate at monitoring co-location. This is in-line with previous research suggesting that Bluetooth cannot accurately measure the distance between fast moving objects and needs about 20 seconds to stabilize distance measurements;therefore, it is not feasible to use for sports. In addition, we recorded that UWB models yielded an accuracy of over 95%, while ultrasound correctly classified the observations over 80% of the time, and Bluetooth had an accuracy of less than 50% when predicting if a given signal is within 6 feet or not. © 2021 IEEE.