Analysis of People Trajectories with Ubiquitous Sensors in a Science Museum

This paper reports a study that estimated visitor positions, visiting patterns, and inter-human relationships at a science museum using information from RFID readers, and found several typical visiting patterns and atypical visiting behavior.

Abstract

This paper reports a study that estimated visitor positions, visiting patterns, and inter-human relationships at a science museum using information from RFID readers. In the science museum, we exhibited humanoid robots. Visitors were invited to wear RFID tags to interact with the robots. Visitor behavior was simultaneously observed using 20 RFID readers, distributed throughout the entire floor, that roughly measured the distances of nearby tags. We integrated the outputs from all RFID readers to estimate visitor trajectories that were used to analyze three perspectives: space, visiting patterns, and relationships. Regarding space, we identified crowded and uncrowded areas. We found several typical visiting patterns, such as visited at every exhibit and directly going to robot area. We also identified atypical visiting behavior. Regarding relationships, for example, we estimated 68% coverage of group-member relationships with 91% reliability.