Towards urgent and rapid deployment of contactless IoT elevator control panel during pandemics

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a contactless IoT elevator control system to decrease the risk of coronavirus transmission whilst using an elevator. Our system is based on a mobile application and an IoT control panel of linear actuators. The system provides the user with a simulated elevator panel through the proposed mobile application allowing the user to register external and internal calls to the elevator without physical contact with the controls. Each elevator connected to the system has a unique QR code. The user uses the mobile application which is connected to our server to scan the QR code. Once the desired elevator is identified, the application displays a simulated elevator panel and registers the calls of the user. Registered calls are used to operate IoT control panels attached to the elevator's internal and external panels allowing the user to request an elevator and select the destination floor without having to touch any potentially contaminated button. Alternatively, our IoT control panels can be operated by issuing a voice command to the user's mobile phone specifying the desired direction and floor. We created a database of voice commands to test our voice recognition accuracy with over 25 testing records of users from different age groups, gender, and countries. Our system reported an accuracy ranging between 92 to 100% for the floor levels and 96% and 100% for the open and close commands, respectively. The emergency command was recognized without errors. Our results show that our system can be an effective tool in limiting the COVID-19 cross-infection from interacting with elevator buttons. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords Contactless elevator control panel, COVID-19, Internet of things (IoT), QR code, Voice recognition