Device-Free Wireless Sensing: Challenges, Opportunities, and Applications

Recent developments on DFWS have shown that wireless signals can be utilized not only as a communication medium to transmit data, but also as an enabling tool for realizing non-intrusive device-free sensing. DFWS has many potential applications, for example, human detection and localization, human activity and gesture recognition, surveillance, elder or patient monitoring, emergency rescue, and so on. With the development and maturity of DFWS, we believe it will eventually empower traditional wireless networks with the augmented ability to sense the surrounding environment, and evolve wireless communication networks into intelligent sensing networks that could sense human-scale context information within the deployment area of the network. The research field of DFWS has emerged quickly recently. This article tries to provide an integrated picture of this emerging field and hopefully inspire future research. Specifically, we present the working principle and system architecture of the DFWS system, review its potential applications, and discuss research challenges and opportunities.