PoHAR: Understanding Hyperlocal Human Activities with Pollution Sensor Networks

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Main Authors: Karmakar, Prasenjit, Reddy, Karthik, Chakraborty, Sandip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Karmakar, Prasenjit
Reddy, Karthik
Chakraborty, Sandip
author_facet Karmakar, Prasenjit
Reddy, Karthik
Chakraborty, Sandip
contents Low-cost air quality sensors are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives as public awareness of air pollution continues to grow, and people take measures to monitor and improve the air they breathe indoors. Besides the standard operation of these sensors, fluctuations in environmental parameters can be leveraged to understand human behavior and activities in indoor spaces. Unlike traditional audio-visual, Radio Frequency, and inertial sensors, air quality sensors are easily scalable to a household, are privacy-preserving, and more economical. Such distributed sensor networks must jointly make decisions to monitor indoor occupants for downstream smart home and healthcare applications. However, due to low processing power, memory, and energy, they often struggle to maintain distributed data consensus and identify activity-affected sensor groups for accurate on-device inference. In this paper, we propose PoHAR framework that implements: (i) a conflict-free replicated data primitive for data sharing, (ii) a hierarchical clustering for ESP32 to detect activity-affected sensor groups with a self-supervised distance metric, and (iii) a leader-based group inference with off-the-shelf ML classifiers, enabling the sensor network to collaboratively detect hyperlocal indoor activities. Our extensive experiments demonstrated on-device activity detection, achieving 97.41% accuracy for indoor activity and 99.68% for cooking activity, using off-the-shelf ML models with latency below 34 microseconds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PoHAR: Understanding Hyperlocal Human Activities with Pollution Sensor Networks
Karmakar, Prasenjit
Reddy, Karthik
Chakraborty, Sandip
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Low-cost air quality sensors are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives as public awareness of air pollution continues to grow, and people take measures to monitor and improve the air they breathe indoors. Besides the standard operation of these sensors, fluctuations in environmental parameters can be leveraged to understand human behavior and activities in indoor spaces. Unlike traditional audio-visual, Radio Frequency, and inertial sensors, air quality sensors are easily scalable to a household, are privacy-preserving, and more economical. Such distributed sensor networks must jointly make decisions to monitor indoor occupants for downstream smart home and healthcare applications. However, due to low processing power, memory, and energy, they often struggle to maintain distributed data consensus and identify activity-affected sensor groups for accurate on-device inference. In this paper, we propose PoHAR framework that implements: (i) a conflict-free replicated data primitive for data sharing, (ii) a hierarchical clustering for ESP32 to detect activity-affected sensor groups with a self-supervised distance metric, and (iii) a leader-based group inference with off-the-shelf ML classifiers, enabling the sensor network to collaboratively detect hyperlocal indoor activities. Our extensive experiments demonstrated on-device activity detection, achieving 97.41% accuracy for indoor activity and 99.68% for cooking activity, using off-the-shelf ML models with latency below 34 microseconds.
title PoHAR: Understanding Hyperlocal Human Activities with Pollution Sensor Networks
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09434