We design a system, SolarGest, which can recognize hand gestures near a solar-powered device by analyzing the patterns of the photocurrent. SolarGest is based on the observation that each gesture interferes with incident light rays on the solar panel in a unique way, leaving its discernible signature in harvested photocurrent. Using solar energy harvesting laws, we develop a model to optimize design and usage of SolarGest. To further improve the robustness of SolarGest under non-deterministic operating conditions, we combine dynamic time warping with Z-score transformation in a signal processing pipeline to pre-process each gesture waveform before it is analyzed for classification. We evaluate SolarGest with both conventional opaque solar cells as well as emerging see-through transparent cells. Our experiments demonstrate that SolarGest achieves 99% for six gestures with a single cell and 95% for fifteen gesture with a$2\times 2$solar cell array. The power measuement study suggests that SolarGest consume 44% less power compared to light sensor based systems.

We propose a novel Visible Light Positioning (VLP) method, called Iris, that uses light spectral information (LSI) to localize humans completely passively in the sense that it neither requires the user to carry any device, nor does it require any modifications to existing lighting infrastructure. Iris localizes a user based on the interference they produce on the LSI recorded at an array of spectral sensors embedded in the environment. We design a deep neural network that can effectively learn location fingerprints directly from the sensor LSI data and predict locations accurately under varying lighting conditions. We prototype Iris using a commercial-off-the-shelf light spectral sensor, AS7265x, which can measure light intensity over 18 different wavelength channels. We benchmark Iris against the state-of-the-art passive VLPs that rely on conventional photo-sensors capable of measuring only a single light intensity value aggregated over the entire visible spectrum. Our evaluations over two typical indoor environments, a 25 m2 one-bedroom apartment and a 13m × 8m office space, demonstrate that Iris can significantly reduce both the localization errors and the number of required sensors, while increasing robustness against changes in environmental lighting.

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of location on the spectral distribution of received light, i.e., the intensity of light for different wavelengths, in indoor environments. Our findings show that, even when using the same light source, different locations exhibit slightly different spectral distribution due to reflections from their localised environment containing different materials or colours. Based on this observation, we present Spectral-Loc, a novel indoor localization method that employs light spectrum information to detect the device's position. Because spectrum sensors are increasingly being used in new products and applications, such as white balance in smartphone photography, Spectral-Loc can be quickly implemented without the need for extra hardware or infrastructure. We used a commercially available light spectrum sensor, the AS7265x, to prototype Spectral-Loc, which can measure light intensity over 18 different wavelength sub-bands. We benchmark the localization accuracy of Spectral-Loc against the conventional light intensity sensors that provide only a single intensity value. Our evaluations in two indoor areas, a meeting room and a large office, show that using light spectral information considerably decreases the localization error for different percentiles.

We design a system, SolarGest, which can recognize hand gestures near a solar-powered device by analyzing the patterns of the photocurrent. SolarGest is based on the observation that each gesture interferes with incident light rays on the solar panel in a unique way, leaving its distinguishable signature in harvested photocurrent. Using solar energy harvesting laws, we develop a model to optimize design and usage of SolarGest. To further improve the robustness of SolarGest under non-deterministic operating conditions, we combine dynamic time warping with Z-score transformation in a signal processing pipeline to pre-process each gesture waveform before it is analyzed for classification. We evaluate SolarGest with both conventional opaque solar cells as well as emerging see-through transparent cells. Our experiments with 6,960 gesture samples for 6 different gestures reveal that even with transparent cells, SolarGest can detect 96% of the gestures while consuming 44% less power compared to light sensor based systems.