DancingAnt: Body-empowered Wireless Sensing Utilizing Pervasive Radiations from Powerline

Abstract

In recent years, wireless sensing has attracted lots of research attention with a large range of applications enabled. However, several critical issues still hinder wireless sensing from being adopted in daily use: (a) requiring dedicated devices and (or) dedicated signals; (b) limited sensing coverage; and (c) affecting the original function of the wireless technology (e.g., communication). In this work, we propose a new sensing modality, i.e., leveraging the pervasive powerline leakage for sensing. The key observation is that human body can capture such leaked signals, and the received signals vary with body gestures. We design a cheap ring antenna to collect the powerline leaked signals at human body and establish a body-empowered model to sense body motions. We prototype the proposed system with designs spanning both hardware and software. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed sensing modality can realize a large range of applications in a different way from existing sensing methods. We showcase the powerful capability of this sensing modality using three typical sensing applications: body gesture recognition, sleep posture sensing, and fall detection.