Wi-Fi Peeks into Buildings to Check Social Distancing

In an initiative to develop a new tool that lets college administrators estimate how many people are in campus buildings to make sure people are social distancing to fight COVID-19, SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems Rajesh Balan provided the key techniques to map devices to locations. He explained that using Wi-Fi signal strength received from thousands of mobile devices across campus, location information can be aggregated and mapped over time to inform about where and when people aggregate.