RAPID: Wireless Positioning for Mitigating COVID19 Surface Transmissions

该项目开发了一种新的微定位技术，用于跟踪手部运动，并在用户即将触摸面部时提醒用户。该技术使用无线信号和移动传感器来跟踪用户的手和脸之间的距离，并引入新的算法和框架，以超低的成本实现高精度和鲁棒性。根据疾病预防控制中心和科学研究，这种技术可以显著减少COVID - 19表面传播，这占所有COVID - 19传播的10%。该项目的成功将对（工厂和杂货店的）关键工人产生直接影响，并有助于加快经济复苏，同时最大限度地减少经济重新开放时可能出现的第二波浪潮的影响。这项研究的潜在长期影响不仅限于covid - 19和未来的大流行，还将为智能环境、室内导航和资产跟踪的网络微定位提供变革性能力。这项提案的目标是设计和制造一种低成本（低于5美元），无处不在的无线定位技术，可以跟踪和预测手到脸的距离。开发这样的技术需要解决精度（厘米尺度）、干扰（来自共存技术和多路径反射）和兼容性（与现有无处不在的技术）方面的挑战。为了克服这些挑战，该项目为移动设备引入了一个原则性的多模态传感器融合框架。该框架通过融合移动设备中已经存在的各种传感模式来运行，包括BLE、加速度计、磁力计和超声波。单独来看，这些模式的超低成本传感器缺乏厘米尺度定位所需的精度和鲁棒性；然而，由于它们经历了不相关的噪声和干扰源，因此将这些模式结合在一个原则概率框架中可以在保持低成本的同时实现高精度和鲁棒性。如果成功，该系统将是迄今为止最精确、最低成本、最普及的微定位技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The project develops a new micro-location technology for tracking hand movements and alerting users when they are about to touch their face. The technology uses wireless signals and mobile sensors to track the distance between a user's hand and their face, and introduces new algorithms and frameworks that enable achieving high accuracy and robustness at ultra-low cost. Such technology can significantly reduce COVID19 surface transmissions, which account for 10% of all COVID transmissions according to the CDC and scientific studies. The success of this project can have an immediate impact on essential workers (in factories and grocery stores) and aide in a quicker economic recovery while minimizing the impact of a potential second wave as the economy re-opens. The potential long-term impact of this research extends beyond COVID19 and future pandemics to providing transformative capabilities in networked micro-location for smart environments, indoor navigation, and asset tracking.The goal of this proposal is to design and build a low-cost (sub-$5), ubiquitous wireless positioning technology that allows tracking and predicting hand-to-face distance. Developing such a technology requires addressing challenges in terms of accuracy (centimeter-scale), interference (from co-existing technologies and multi-path reflections), and compatibility (with existing ubiquitous technologies). To overcome these challenges, the project introduces a principled multi-modal sensor fusion framework for mobile devices. This framework operates by fusing various sensing modalities that already exist in mobile devices -- including BLE, accelerometers, magnetometers, and ultrasound. Taken individually, ultra-low-cost sensors for each of these modalities lack the necessary accuracy and robustness for centimeter-scale positioning; however, because they experience uncorrelated sources of noise and interference, combining these modalities in a principled probabilistic framework enables achieving high accuracy and robustness while maintaining low cost. If successful, the resulting system would be the most accurate, low-cost, and ubiquitious micro-location technology to date.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.