Toward Wide-Area Contactless Wireless Sensing

Abstract

Contactless wireless sensing without attaching a device to the target has achieved promising progress in recent years. However, one severe limitation is the small sensing range. This paper presents Widesee to realize wide-area sensing with only one transceiver pair. Widesee utilizes the LoRa signal to achieve a larger range of sensing and further incorporates drone’s mobility to broaden the sensing area. Widesee presents solutions across software and hardware to overcome two aspects of challenges for wide-range contactless sensing: (i) the interference brought by device mobility and LoRa’s high sensitivity; and (ii) the ambiguous target information such as location when employing just a single pair of transceivers for sensing. We have developed a working prototype of Widesee for human target detection and localization that are especially useful in emergency scenarios such as rescue search, and evaluated Widesee with both controlled experiments and the field study in a high-rise building. Extensive experiments demonstrate the great potential of Widesee for wide-area contactless sensing with a single LoRa transceiver pair hosted on a drone.