Wireless AI in Smart Car: How Smart a Car Can Be?

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of smart devices connect, interact, and exchange data with each other. As “things” get connected together, intelligent systems and technologies have been developed to exploit the rich information in the collected data, perceive what is happening in the surroundings, and finally take actions to maximize their own utility. Thanks to the ubiquitous wireless signals and the prevalence of wireless devices, wireless sensing becomes more popular among the various approaches that have been adopted in the IoT to measure the surrounding environment. Because human activities interact with wireless signals and introduce distinct patterns to the propagation, analyzing how wireless channel state information (CSI) responds to human activities enables many IoT applications. Recently, radio analytics has been proposed as a promising technique that exploits multipath as virtual antennas, extracts various features from wireless signals, and reveals rich environmental information. As automobiles continue to play an important role nowadays, manufacturers have been seeking emerging techniques for IoT applications that support drivers and enhance safety. The interior of an automobile can be viewed as a special indoor environment where most of the multipaths are restricted inside by the metal exterior. In this article, we introduce the concept of wireless artificial intelligence (AI) and demonstrate its concept in a smart car scenario where information about drivers and passengers is collected by commercial Wi-Fi devices deployed in the car. The proposed wireless AI system is capable of identifying authorized drivers based on radio biometric information. Vital signals of human introduce periodic patterns to the wireless CSI. By extracting the vital sign from wireless signals, the proposed wireless AI system can monitor the driver's state, count number of people in the car, and detect a child left in an unattended car.