Recently, Wi-Fi signals have emerged as a powerful tool for contactless sensing. During the sensing process, obtaining target direction information can provide valuable contextual insights for various applications. Existing direction estimation methods typically rely on antenna arrays, which are costly and complex to deploy in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present WiRainbow, a novel approach that enables single-antenna-based direction awareness for Wi-Fi sensing by leveraging the dispersion effect of frequency-scanning antennas (FSAs), which can naturally steer Wi-Fi subcarriers toward distinct angles during signal transmission. To address key challenges in antenna design and signal processing, we propose a coupled-resonator-based antenna architecture that significantly expands the narrow Field-of-View inherent in conventional FSAs, improving sensing coverage. Additionally, we develop a sensing signal-to-noise-ratio-based signal processing framework that reliably estimates target direction in multipath-rich environments. We prototype WiRainbow and evaluate its performance through benchmark experiments and real-world case studies, demonstrating its ability to achieve accurate, robust, and cost-effective direction awareness for diverse Wi-Fi sensing applications.

Wireless sensing technologies have shown significant promise in various applications, but their spatial coverage is confined to the vicinity of the transmitters, limiting their applicability in broader environments. In this paper, we introduce an innovative wireless sensing approach based on the globally covered Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals. While GNSS signals have been widely used in remote sensing to monitor slow changes in the Earth’s surface, like sea level and snow depth, their ability to accurately detect highly dynamic target motions, such as human respiration, gestures, and intrusions, remains unclear. The main challenge arises from the interference brought by the large-scale satellite movement and severe GNSS signal errors. In this study, we present a novel GNSS signal enhancement system named FineSat to address these interference. Specifically, we first utilize polynomial representations to cancel satellite movement interference. Then, based on the analysis of GNSS signal errors, we propose a signal differential processing module to mitigate the errors. We implement our system on commercial devices and validate its performance in three sensing applications: respiration monitoring, gesture recognition, and intrusion detection. Results show that we achieve 0.42 bpm mean absolute error in respiration monitoring, 96.5% average accuracy in gesture recognition, and 98.6% accuracy in intrusion detection.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a leading cause of mortality worldwide, highlighting the critical need for accurate and continuous heart health monitoring. Electrocardiograms (ECG), considered as the golden standard for diagnosing and monitoring heart-related conditions, offer precise measurements but require direct skin contact, limiting their practicality for long-term and everyday use. On the other hand, existing RF sensing techniques that analyze signals reflected off the skin struggle to distinguish micro cardiac motions of the heart due to weak motion amplitude and respiration interference at the chest wall. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WiCG, a novel contact-less cardiac motion monitoring system that employs 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals to penetrate the chest and detect subtle cardiac movements. A mix-medium Wi-Fi Fresnel zone model is developed to explain the enhanced phase sensitivity of in-body Wi-Fi signals, which is crucial for accurately detecting cardiac motions. By strategically positioning antennas near the heart, WiCG captures ventricular motions effectively. A novel cardiac Doppler method is proposed to suppress phase noise and interference from static paths and extract the time interval between the systole and diastole of the ventricular. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed system can robustly estimate the R-R and Q-T intervals of human cardiac cycles across 21 subjects and different environments with an average accuracy of 99.22% and 92.8%, achieving performance comparable to ECG.

Most existing RF-based vital sign monitoring systems either assume that a human subject is stationary or discard measurements when motion is detected in order to output reliable respiration rates and heart rates. Such an assumption greatly limits the usability of these systems in practice. Even during sleep, one can undergo various body states including turns and involuntary twitches in light sleep, motionlessness during deep sleep, or abnormal limb movements due to sleep disorders such as restless legs syndrome. In this work, we develop SlpRoF, a low-cost contact-free system using a commercial-off-the-shelf UWB radar that achieves high temporal coverage and high accuracy in vital sign monitoring during sleep. By classifying body states into the motionless state, limb movement state, and torso movement state, and extracting vital signs during the first two states, it directly increases effective reporting periods over nights. By analyzing high-order harmonics and leveraging spatial diversity in captured signals from multiple on-body areas, it improves the accuracy of heart rate estimations and thus indirectly increases temporal coverage through reliable assessments. Experiment results show that SlpRoF is able to achieve an average median absolute error (MAE) of 0.44 beats per minute (bpm) in respiration rates, 1.55s in respiration intervals, and 0.9 bpm for heart rates, respectively.