PIRMedic

Abstract

Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensors are an integral part of modern living. They have diverse applications ranging from automatic lighting and heating control in smart buildings, towel dispensers in washrooms, security alarms (for intrusion detection) to even human detection robots (for search and rescue). Unfortunately, PIR sensors are prone to failures during deployment due to reasons such as environmental damage, incorrect installation and component degradation among others that can lead to incorrect or faulty data. Currently, such failures are typically detected using either : (a) heavily engineered data-driven, statistical approaches that can have high false positive rates due to unseen data patterns or (b) expensive methods that use additional hardware such as video cameras or a golden reference sensor. The second approach inhibits scalability.