Toward Smart Doors: A Position Paper

Conventional automatic doors cannot distinguish between people wishing to pass through the door and people passing by the door, so they often open unnecessarily. This leads to the need to adopt new systems in both commercial and non-commercial environments: smart doors. In particular, a smart door system predicts the intention of people near the door based on the social context of the surrounding environment and then makes rational decisions about whether or not to open the door. This work proposes the first position paper related to smart doors, without bells and whistles. We first point out that the problem not only concerns reliability, climate control, safety, and mode of operation. Indeed, a system to predict the intention of people near the door also involves a deeper understanding of the social context of the scene through a complex combined analysis of proxemics and scene reasoning. Furthermore, we conduct an exhaustive literature review about automatic doors, providing a novel system formulation. Also, we present an analysis of the possible future application of smart doors, a description of the ethical shortcomings, and legislative issues.