A Low Power Infrared Sensor for Direction, Speed, Distance Finding for Contextual Intelligence

This paper presents a device capable of context awareness exploiting novel ultra-low power thermal infrared sensors (TMOS) from STMicroelectronics. We propose a new method using a single infrared sensor to estimate distance, speed and direction of movement with an accuracy of up to 98.36%. We also propose a lightweight algorithm optimized for working on hardware constrained systems such as a microcontroller, reaching high accuracy detection at very low power values. The TMOS sensor averages at 58.9µW at a 8Hz sampling frequency, showing superior performance compared to more popular pyroelectric sensors when considering the number of sensors used and the corresponding estimation scores. The paper shows a full set of characterization and experimental results to show the benefits of the proposed method.