  Tracking of occupants within buildings has become a topic of interest in the
past decade. Occupant tracking has been used in the public safety, energy
conservation, and marketing fields. Various methods have been demonstrated
which can track people outside of and inside buildings; including GPS,
visual-based tracking using surveillance cameras, and vibration-based tracking
using sensors such as accelerometers. In this work, those main systems for
tracking occupants are compared and contrasted for the levels of detail they
give about where occupants are, as well as their respective privacy concerns
and how identifiable the tracking information collected is to a specific
person. We discuss a case study using vibrations sensors mounted in Virginia
Tech's Goodwin Hall that was recently conducted, demonstrating that similar
levels of accuracy in occupant localization can be achieved to current methods,
and highlighting the amount of identifying information in the vibration signals
dataset. Finally, a method of transforming the vibration data to preserve
occupant privacy was proposed and tested on the dataset. The results indicate
that our proposed method has successfully resulted in anonymizing the
occupant's gender information which was previously identifiable from the
vibration data, while minimally impacting the localization accuracy achieved
without anonymization.
