CAREER: Wide Area Wireless Sensing: Theories and Applications

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Sensors are omnipresent in our everyday lives. They are embedded in a diverse range of systems such as smartphones, wearables, gaming devices, medical equipment and automobiles. Wireless sensing is an exciting new research area which utilizes existing wireless signals instead of conventional sensors for sensing human beings and the surrounding environment, benefiting a large spectrum of disciplines including elderly care, human–computer interaction, environment monitoring, and disaster response.

The contact-free and sensor-free nature of wireless sensing makes it particularly appealing in challenging scenarios such as pandemic and disaster survivor search. This project aims to lay the theoretical foundations for long-range wide-area wireless sensing and to use LoRa signals to realize new applications such as disaster survivor sensing, humidity sensing and gas leakage detection.

In particular, this project will build the theoretical foundations to uncover the underlying principles of long-range wireless sensing and to guide the design of wireless sensing systems. This project also aims at pushing the performance boundaries of wide-area wireless sensing in terms of range, accuracy, and robustness to enable new applications which were not possible previously.

The project comprises several major research thrusts: (i) Develop a general model to quantify the performance of long-range sensing, analyze factors affecting the performance, and propose signal processing schemes to improve sensing performance and deal with interference; (ii) Study the effect of strong secondary reflection in LoRa sensing and leverage the mobility of drones to further increase the sensing coverage; (iii) Enable detection of survivors even in a coma through long-range through-wall respiration sensing; and (iv) Achieve long-range humidity sensing and gas leakage detection by deploying just one LoRa transceiver pair without any additional sensors.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.