PAWS: Passive Human Activity Recognition Based on WiFi Ambient Signals

Indoor human activity recognition remains a hot topic and receives tremendous research efforts during the last few decades. However, previous solutions either rely on special hardware, or demand the cooperation of subjects. Therefore, the scalability issue remains a great challenge. To this end, we present an online activity recognition system, which explores WiFi ambient signals for received signal strength indicator (RSSI) fingerprint of different activities. It can be integrated into any existing WLAN networks without additional hardware support. Also, it does not need the subjects to be cooperative during the recognition process. More specifically, we first conduct an empirical study to gain in-depth understanding of WiFi characteristics, e.g., the impact of activities on the WiFi RSSI. Then, we present an online activity recognition architecture that is flexible and can adapt to different settings/conditions/scenarios. Lastly, a prototype system is built and evaluated via extensive real-world experiments. A novel fusion algorithm is specifically designed based on the classification tree to better classify activities with similar signatures. Experimental results show that the fusion algorithm outperforms three other well-known classifiers [i.e., NaiveBayes, Bagging, and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN)] in terms of accuracy and complexity. Important sights and hands-on experiences have been obtained to guide the system implementation and outline future research directions.