Bus Ride Guidance
Bus riders waiting at a bus stop, generally find incoming buses too crowded and hesitate between taking that crowded bus or waiting for another one.
Design and implement an intelligent system (hardware and software) for providing suggestions to commuters based on current and previously collected data. The system should collect and learn necessary data about the people who intend to take a bus towards a certain destination in a complex network on an hourly and daily basis. The system should provide suggestions with justifications for boarding the incoming bus or for waiting for another one. The suggestion should be based on some learned statistics such as bus frequency, the number of passengers in the arriving bus, and the number of passengers waiting at the bus stop.
In order to design such an intelligent system, you should
- take into account the possible variations in the frequency of the buses, which may change on weekdays, weekends, holidays, etc.,
- be able to estimate the crowding in the bus and at the bus stop with sensors and predict them in the near future for the next arrival of buses,
- consider realistic schedules and networks such as METU campus, Ankara, or any other city bus schedules.
Self-Protective Measures
In the case of a pandemic, the first measure to be taken is to protect healthy people from being infected at all times. To this end, authorities advise people to
- refrain from touching eyes, nose and mouth or face in general, and
- wash hands frequently.
Design and construct a wearable device (*) to predict, track, and detect such actions with minimum false alarms and warn the wearer to take these protective measures.
(*) Wearable devices are smart electronic devices that are worn close to and/or on the surface of the skin (such as bracelets, necklaces, watches or other ornaments). These devices detect, analyze, and display/transmit information concerning, e.g., body signals such as vital signs, and/or ambient data.
Wearable devices should be non-bulky (i.e., small in size and light in weight) to be comfortable to wear, and battery-operated with little power consumption. They may detect risks and immediately warn the wearer, or keep a log of accumulated risk for future assessment of risks, or both.
Self-Monitoring for Symptoms
An important factor to keep a pandemic under control is to identify infected people at an early stage.This will help ease their treatment and also help reduce the spread of the pandemic by proper isolation. For this reason, people are advised to seek medical care and take a test, if they cough or sneeze more often than usual, have a fever or show other major symptoms of COVID-19.
Design and construct a wearable device (*) to warn the wearer and help seek early medical care if they show such symptoms. The device should monitor and check for symptoms automatically (e.g., cough, sneeze, fever, etc.). It can also ask for the user’s input for undetectable symptoms (e.g., chest pain, etc.).
(*) Wearable devices are smart electronic devices that are worn close to and/or on the surface of the skin (such as bracelets, necklaces, watches or other ornaments). These devices detect, analyze, and display/transmit information concerning, e.g., body signals such as vital signs, and/or ambient data.
Wearable devices should be non-bulky (i.e., small in size and light in weight) to be comfortable to wear, and battery-operated with little power consumption. They may detect risks and immediately warn the wearer, or keep a log of accumulated risk for future assessment of risks, or both.
Surveillance – Protective Measures
In the case of a pandemic, one of the most important hubs of the spread of the disease are crowded buildings. Therefore measures to be taken to prevent the spread of the disease should include controlling the population in the buildings, and prevent the entrance of people suspected of being already infected or not following the suggested protective measures.
We would like to design a system to operate together with a lock to
- deny entrance to risk-carrying people and
- gather data for monitoring purposes.
The system should check whether the person attempting to enter the building
- wears a face mask,
- wears a mask properly,
- does not show symptoms such as fever or similar
and deny entrance if
- these requirements are not fully satisfied or
- the building is highly populated (based on the data collected at the gates)
and indicate the reason for denial.
Museum Audio Guide and Visitor Monitoring System
The main purpose of this project is to design and implement a guidance system for the visitors of a museum. The system will allow visitors to purchase tickets for different sections (rooms) of a museum, track their locations during their visit, and automatically inform the visitors about the item they are visiting through the earphone of a portable device.
The system should have the following features:
- At the entrance of the museum, visitors purchase a ticket and they are identified by the system. They select which sections of the museum they would like to visit when buying their ticket and pay accordingly. Each visitor is provided with an electronic handheld museum guide.
- During the visit, the system follows the track of the visitors. If visitors attempt to enter parts of the museum that are not covered by their ticket, the system announces that the credit card of the visitor will be charged if they enter.
- Precise locations of the visitors will be tracked by the system at all times with a maximum error of 50 cm in position. If a certain section reaches a predetermined maximum occupancy, the new visitors should be warned and recommended to wait or go to a different section.
- Electronic equipment can be placed only within a circle of 1-meter diameter around each displayed item.
- The audio guide device should have a sufficiently long battery life to conveniently allow an entire visit of the museum without recharging.
- The system should be capable of handling a museum of at least 2 sections with at least 3 display items within each section. The items should have a distance of 3 meters or more from each other.