dBHound: Privacy Sensitive Acoustic Perception in Home Settings: Poster Abstract

We present dBHound, a mobile sensing analytics app for tracking room occupancy and activities while preserving privacy for users. dBHound takes advantage of audio sensors available on mobile devices to collect data about the environment. dBHound is a layer in the mobile operating system API that gathers decibel (dB) data from the device's onboard audio sensors and strips it of sensitive information. Using mobile devices as sensors has the advantage that users do not have to purchase or manage additional sensing devices within the home. Among the different sensor modalities discussed in [4, 1, 2, 5, 3] many of which are limited to detecting a small subset of activities in-home, sound is a highly general and aligns well with everyday human activity. We demonstrate that having access to decibel-level data streams from multiple devices can give us more insight into activity and occupancy patterns than a single sensor, without compromising privacy.