Channel State Information from Pure Communication to Sense and Track Human Motion: A Survey

Human motion detection and activity recognition are becoming vital for the applications in smart homes. Traditional Human Activity Recognition (HAR) mechanisms use special devices to track human motions, such as cameras (vision-based) and various types of sensors (sensor-based). These mechanisms are applied in different applications, such as home security, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), gaming, and healthcare. However, traditional HAR methods require heavy installation, and can only work under strict conditions. Recently, wireless signals have been utilized to track human motion and HAR in indoor environments. The motion of an object in the test environment causes fluctuations and changes in the Wi-Fi signal reflections at the receiver, which result in variations in received signals. These fluctuations can be used to track object (i.e., a human) motion in indoor environments. This phenomenon can be improved and leveraged in the future to improve the internet of things (IoT) and smart home devices. The main Wi-Fi sensing methods can be broadly categorized as Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Wi-Fi radar (by using Software Defined Radio (SDR)) and Channel State Information (CSI). CSI and RSSI can be considered as device-free mechanisms because they do not require cumbersome installation, whereas the Wi-Fi radar mechanism requires special devices (i.e., Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP)). Recent studies demonstrate that CSI outperforms RSSI in sensing accuracy due to its stability and rich information. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent advances in the CSI-based sensing mechanism and illustrates the drawbacks, discusses challenges, and presents some suggestions for the future of device-free sensing technology.