Literature review on wireless sensing-Wi-Fi signal-based recognition of human activities

With the rapid development and wide deployment of wireless technology, Wi-Fi signals have no longer been confined to the Internet as a communication medium. Wi-Fi signals will be modulated again by human actions when propagating indoors, carrying rich human body state information. Therefore, a novel wireless sensing technology is gradually emerging that can realize gesture recognition, human daily activity detection, identification, indoor localization and human body tracking, vital signs detection, imaging, and emotional recognition by extracting effective feature information about human actions from Wi-Fi signals. Researchers mainly use channel state information or frequency modulated carrier wave in their current implementation schemes of wireless sensing technology, called “Walls have eyes”, and these schemes cover radio-frequency technology, signal processing technology, and machine learning. These available wireless sensing systems can be used in many applications such as smart home, medical health care, search-and-rescue, security, and with the high precision and passively device-free through-wall detection function. This paper elaborates the research actuality and summarizes each system structure and the basic principles of various wireless sensing applications in detail. Meanwhile, two popular implementation schemes are analyzed. In addition, the future diversely application prospects of wireless sensing systems are presented.