Sensor to detect foot steps on floor

Question

Hi!

I am thinking of trying person identification through their foot step sound / vibration. This is should be entirely possible because humans can do it and some research papers exist on this topic. But here comes the question:

Which (low cost) sensor(s) should I use?

Options I consider are:

Geophone
Accelerometer
Microphone
Vibration sensor (piezo)

Geophones are expensive, starting at around 60 EUR, microphones are not good at low frequencies, accelerometer and vibration sensor might be not sensitive enough. Any Ideas?

Edited to add:

Are accelerometers sensitive enough to detect foot steps several meters away (asuming a hardwood floor)?

Any specific products you can recomend?

Thank you!

clem57 · Accepted Answer

How about a combination or hybridization approach. Clemm

dougw · Answer

Piezo disks are very low cost and probably sensitive enough, depending on the floor and the shoe. I just tried my desktop sensor and it easily detects me walking on a hard wood floor in my socks from 12 feet away. Just normal soft walking - not stamping along. It was designed to detect small vibrations on my desk, like dropping a business card, and it locks out subsequent triggers for a couple of seconds so it doesn't continuously stay triggered. Because of this lockout feature it is not going to trigger on every footstep, but it is sufficient to prove feasibility. You can see it in action on my desk in this blog: Tis The Season For Arduino Data from sensors like this would be mostly useful to detect event timing, as in when a foot contacts the ground - the waveforms would be hard to analyze if you want to extract more information than this from the signal. Even extracting useful amplitude data would be problematic ..... Possible, but requiring some careful thought about the signal and signal processing.

DAB · Answer

I would start with a throw rug with embedded capacitive sensing. That way out can get measurements on shoe size, gait, stride and other data for isolating the correct person. DAB

michaelkellett · Answer

An accelerometer of the right type can easily do what you want. The problem is that you will probably need to make your own since the typical low cost MEMS parts may be too noisy. Find the Analog Devices chip accelerometer with the lowest noise and give it a try. MK

Sensor to detect foot steps on floor

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