TARF: Technology-Agnostic RF Sensing for Human Activity Recognition

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2023 Feb;27(2):636-647. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3175912. Epub 2023 Feb 3.

Abstract

With the rapid development towards smart Internet of Things (IoT), detection of human activity has become essential in a variety of applications. Various radio-frequency (RF) sensing technologies, such as WiFi, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), and Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar, have been utilized for non-invasive human activity recognition (HAR). It will be highly desirable to develop a HAR solution that can work with different types of RF technologies, such that the cost and the barrier of wide deployment can both be greatly reduced, and more robust performance can be achieved by utilizing the complementary RF sensory data. In this paper, we propose a technology-agnostic approach for RF-based HAR, termed TARF, which works with several different RF sensing technologies. A novel data generalization technique is proposed to mitigate the disparity in measured data from different RF devices. A domain adversarial neural network is proposed to combat the interference from various RF sensing technologies. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated with experiments using four different RF sensing technologies. TARF is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based solution with considerable gains.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Human Activities*
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Radar
  • Radio Frequency Identification Device* / methods
  • Technology