Title
Measuring human queues using WiFi signals
Abstract
We investigate using smartphone WiFi signals to track human queues, which are common in many business areas such as retail stores, airports, and theme parks. Real-time monitoring of such queues would enable a wealth of new applications, such as bottleneck analysis, shift assignments, and dynamic workflow scheduling. We take a minimum infrastructure approach and thus utilize a single monitor placed close to the service area along with transmitting phones. Our strategy extracts unique features embedded in the signal traces to infer the critical time points when a person reaches the head of the queue and finishes service, and from these inferences we derive a person's waiting and service times. We develop a feature driven approach in our system. Extensive experiments conducted both in the laboratory demonstrate that our system is robust to queues with different waiting time. We show that in spite of noisy signal readings, our methods can measure important time periods in queue (e.g., service and waiting times) to within a $10$ second resolution.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2500423.2504584
MobiCom
Keywords
Field
DocType
service area,business area,wifi signal,important time period,bottleneck analysis,human queue,minimum infrastructure approach,critical time point,service time,signal trace,noisy signal reading
Bottleneck,Workflow scheduling,Computer science,Queue,Computer network,Real-time computing,Queue management system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.83
2
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yan Wang181140.19
Jie Yang2160583.06
Hongbo Liu3122.88
Yingying Chen42495193.14
Marco Gruteser54631309.81
Richard P. Martin61777165.29