Publications
Ensuring Reliability in Consumer LiDAR-Based Spatial Compliance: A Scan Quality Validation Framework for Regulated Residential Care Environments
Chaitanya Dharmaj Appikonda · Health Systems Infrastructure Lab
Preprint · engrXiv · April 11, 2026 · DOI: 10.31224/6779
Consumer-grade LiDAR sensors embedded in mobile devices have demonstrated sufficient accuracy for many building measurement applications under controlled conditions. However, deployment in regulatory compliance contexts introduces a reliability problem that accuracy specifications alone cannot address: when operated by untrained or semi-trained personnel across heterogeneous residential environments, measurement uncertainty expands substantially and non-uniformly. This paper characterizes the distribution-of-quality problem in consumer LiDAR deployment for HCBS facility compliance under 42 CFR 441.301 and the ADA 2010 Standards for Accessible Design, and presents the Scan Quality Validation Layer (SQVL), a seven-component pre-processing framework designed to make scan-derived compliance findings defensible in regulatory and legal contexts.