Social Sensing: A Wi-Fi based Social Sense for Perceiving the Surrounding People

People who are blind or have social disabilities can encounter difficulties in properly sensing and interacting with surrounding people. We suggest here the use of a sensory augmentation approach, which will offer the user perceptual input via properly functioning sensory channels (e.g. visual, tactile) for this purpose. Specifically, we created a Wi-Fi signal based system to help the user determine the presence of one or more people in the room. The signal's strength determines the distance of the people in near proximity. These distances are sonified and played sequentially. The Wi-Fi signal arises from common Smartphones, and can therefore be adapted for everyday use in a simple manner. We demonstrate the use of this system by showing it's significance in determining the presence of others. Specifically, we show that it allows to determine the location (i.e. close, inside or outside) and amount of people at each distance. This system can be further adopted for purposes such as locating one's group in a crowd, following a group in a new location, enhancing identification for people with prosopagnosia, raising awareness for the presence of others as part of a rehabilitation behavioral program for people with ASD, or for real-life social networking.