Supporting Home Quarantine with Smart Speakers
Abrar S. Alrumayh, Chiu C. Tan · 2020
The outbreak of COVID-19 has been lead many countries to ask their citizens to home quarantine. Smart speakers, like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, that continuously listen for voice commands, can potentially be used to help in monitoring adherence to quarantine rules. This paper proposes a monitoring solution to count the number of occupants in a home. Our technique is sufficiently lightweight to avoid using backend cloud computing facility so as to protect privacy, and is robust against common background noises such as television. To evaluate the performance of our technique, we perform experiments on real-world traces recorded from five different families. Our results show that the proposed algorithm is able to count the family member reliably across different home environments.