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SensAnalysis: A Big Data Platform for Vibration-Sensor Data Analysis

The Goodwin Hall building on the Virginia Tech campus is the most instrumented building for vibration monitoring. It houses 225 hard-wired accelerometers which record vibrations arising due to internal as well as external activities. The recorded vibration data can be used to develop real-time applications for monitoring the health of the building or detecting human activity in the building. However, the lack of infrastructure to handle the massive scale of the data, and the steep learning curve of the tools required to store and process the data, are major deterrents for the researchers to perform their experiments. Additionally, researchers want to explore the data to determine the type of experiments they can perform. This work tries to solve these problems by providing a system to store and process the data using existing big data technologies. The system simplifies the process of big data analysis by supporting code re-usability and multiple programming languages. The effectiveness of the system was demonstrated by four case studies. Additionally, three visualizations were developed to help researchers in the initial data exploration. / Master of Science / The Goodwin Hall building on the Virginia Tech campus is an example of a ‘smart building.’ It uses sensors to record the response of the building to various internal and external activities. The recorded data can be used by algorithms to facilitate understanding of the properties of the building or to detect human activity. Accordingly, researchers in the Virginia Tech Smart Infrastructure Lab (VTSIL) run experiments using a part of the complete data. Ideally, they want to run their experiments continuously as new data is collected. However, the massive scale of the data makes it difficult to process new data as soon as it arrives, and to make it available immediately to the researchers. The technologies that can handle data at this scale have a steep learning curve. Starting to use them requires much time and effort. This project involved building a system to handle these challenges so that researchers can focus on their core area of research. The system provides visualizations depicting various properties of the data to help researchers explore that data before running an experiment. The effectiveness of this work was demonstrated using four case studies. These case studies used the actual experiments conducted by VTSIL researchers in the past. The first three case studies help in understanding the properties of the building whereas the final case study deals with detecting and locating human footsteps, on one of the floors, in real-time.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/101529
Date26 June 2019
CreatorsKumar, Abhinav
ContributorsComputer Science, Fox, Edward A., Tarazaga, Pablo Alberto, North, Christopher L., Xie, Zhiwu
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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