iKey: An intelligent key system based on efficient inclination angle sensing techniques

Abstract

The elderly may have different aspects of inconvenience in their daily life. Among them, many old people have trouble remembering things even just happened hours ago. They often forget whether they have locked the door while leaving so that they may have to return and check. Such situation also happens to many younger people that do not concentrate their mind while locking the door. In this paper, an intelligent key system, iKey, is proposed to solve such problem. It can be deployed on an existing key to detect user’s locking actions and store locking status in the form of time. Related hardware architecture and working process are proposed. The sensing module based on inclination angle sensors is designed to reduce the amount of data generated. Furthermore, efficient locking detection algorithms are proposed accordingly. Such system and techniques can also be applied in knobs or rotating handles of machines and facilities to detect illegal operations and to avoid user’s forgetting to operate them.