Social Distancing Monitor
Channel: UNLVECE
Date: 2021-06-11

Social distancing is known to decrease the potential spread of the novel COVID-19 virus. The social distancing monitoring without invasion of the individuals privacy will allow for the understanding and improvement of safety in public spaces. Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar is less expensive and more robust than other alternatives and can be implemented to track how people move through an environment. The drawback to using FMCW radar is that they are susceptible to significant attenuation over distance. The Texas Instruments mmWave SDK and IWR6843ISK provides an excellent platform to develop applications with this novel technology. By networking these radar sensors together, a system can be formed that is capable of capturing point cloud data in a large area. In addition to this application, this system can be used for other commercial purposes such as people counting and queue timing with small modifications. The data captured and recorded by this system will allow for understanding an environment and how it can be changed for improvements. Our solution is capable of locating individuals in an environment and calculating the distance they are relative to other individuals detected in the environment.