Power-Efficient Cyber-Physical Late Arrival Detection with Smartphones

Late arrival to jobs and meetings is a critical problem in a number of domains, such as building construction. Smart phones are a promising platform for detecting late arrivals and notifying affected parties due to the variety of sensors they possess, persistent Internet connection, and access to a user´s calendar data. This paper presents a power-efficient cyber-physical approach to indoor/outdoor late arrival detection, called LifeSaver. The paper provides the following three contributions to the study of late arrival detection and notification with smart phones: 1) it presents a cyber-physical approach for using accelerometer data to predict when a user is moving and make more power efficient localization decisions, 2) it shows how Bluetooth beacons can be used to provide a simplified meeting room localization mechanism for smart phones, and 3) it presents empirical results showing that the cyber-physical LifeSaver late arrival detection approach uses 43% less power compared to lateness detection approaches that rely on standard localization strategies.