Multilocation Human Activity Recognition via MIMO-OFDM-Based Wireless Networks: An IoT-Inspired Device-Free Sensing Approach

Device-free sensing (DFS) is an emerging technology that empowers wireless communication systems with the ability for not only data communication but also smart sensing. By taking advantage of machine-learning technologies, DFS transforms traditional wireless communication networks into intelligent context-aware networks and will open the doors for a myriad of promising 6G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) applications, ranging from smart home to smart buildings. Although significant progress has been made for human activity recognition at a single location by leveraging this technology, performance at multiple locations has not been fully explored. As far as multilocation activity sensing is concerned, the performance is compromised along with the change of locations and labor-intensive annotation works caused by multilocation. To tackle this issue, an activity decomposition network (ActNet) is presented to decompose the activity information directly from input samples by using the training data from different locations together. Instead of dealing with different locations separately, our ActNet can assemble data from different locations together for training to mitigate the data limitation issue caused by a single location. To achieve this, a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology-based prototype system is utilized to collect data samples at 24 different locations in a cluttered office environment. Especially, for each location, only ten samples of each activity are used for training. Experiments demonstrate that the average classification accuracy is 94.6% across all locations with ensured robustness produced by our method.