RISAR: Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-Assisted Human Activity Recognition With Commercial Wi-Fi Devices

Human activity recognition (HAR) is crucial in smart homes, security, and healthcare. Existing systems are limited by insufficient spatial diversity due to the constrained number of antennas. Additionally, challenges in noise reduction and feature extraction from sensing data, particularly channel state information (CSI), affect recognition performance. This study introduces a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted passive HAR (RISAR) method compatible with commercial Wi-Fi devices. RISAR leverages RIS to enhance the spatial diversity of Wi-Fi signals, capturing a broader range of spatial information. A novel high-dimensional factor model based on random matrix theory is proposed to improve noise reduction and feature extraction in the temporal domain. Furthermore, a dual-stream spatiotemporal attention network model is developed to assign variable weights to different characteristics and sequences, mimicking human cognitive processes in prioritizing essential information. Experimental results demonstrate that RISAR significantly outperforms existing HAR methods in both accuracy and efficiency, achieving an average accuracy of 97.26%. These findings highlight RISAR’s adaptability and potential as a robust activity recognition solution in real-world environments.