SA-WiSense: A Blind-Spot-Free Respiration Sensing Framework for Single-Antenna Wi-Fi Devices

Wi-Fi sensing offers a promising technique for contactless human respiration monitoring. A key challenge, however, is the blind spot problem caused by random phase offsets that corrupt the complementarity of respiratory signals. To address the challenge, we propose a single-antenna-Wi-Fi-sensing (SA-WiSense) framework to improve accuracy of human respiration monitoring, robust against random phase offsets. The proposed SA-WiSense framework is cost-efficient, as only a single antenna is used rather than multiple antennas as in the previous works. Therefore, the proposed framework is applicable to Internet of Thing (IoT), where most of sensors are equipped with a single antenna. On one hand, we propose a cross-subcarrier channel state information (CSI) ratio (CSCR) based blind spot mitigation approach for IoT, where the ratios of two values of CSI between subcarriers are leveraged to mitigate random phase offsets. We prove that the random phase offsets can be cancelled by the proposed CSCR approach, thereby restoring the inherent complementarity of signals for blind-spot-free sensing. On the other hand, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based subcarrier selection (GASS) approach by formulating an optimization problem in terms of the sensing-signal-to-noise ratio (SSNR) of CSCR between subcarriers. GA is utilized to solve the formulated optimization problem. We use commodity ESP32 microcontrollers to build an experiment test. The proposed works are validated to achieve an detection rate of 91.2% for respiration monitoring at distances up to 8.0 meters, substantially more accurate than the state-of-the-art methods with a single antenna.