New Wi-Fi Technology Reads Your Gestures To Control Appliances
Want to change the
song playing on your music system in the other room? You can just move your
hand to the right and flip through the songs. Indian-origin researchers from
the University of Washington have developed a new gesture-recognition
technology called WiSee that brings this a step closer to reality. Researchers
have shown it's possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific
movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.
By using an adapted
Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control
their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a
simple gesture. “This is repurposing wireless signals that already exist in new
ways. You can actually use wireless for gesture recognition without needing to
deploy more sensors,” said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, an assistant
professor of computer science and engineering at University of Washington. The
concept is similar to Xbox Kinect - a commercial product that uses cameras to
recognise gestures - but the new technology is simpler, cheaper and doesn't
require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control. That's
because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren't bound by
line-of-sight or sound restrictions. The University of Washington researchers
built a 'smart' receiver device that essentially listens to all of the wireless
transmissions coming from devices throughout a home, including smartphones,
laptops and tablets. A standard Wi-Fi router could be adapted to function as a
receiver. When a person moves, there is a slight change in the frequency of the
wireless signal. Moving a hand or foot causes the receiver to detect a pattern
of changes known as the Doppler frequency shift. These frequency changes are
very small - only several hertz - when compared with Wi-Fi signals that have a
20 megahertz bandwidth and operate at 5 gigahertz. The team, including Shwetak
Patel and Sidhant Gupta, developed an algorithm to detect these slight shifts.
The technology also accounts for gaps in wireless signals when devices aren't
transmitting. The technology can identify nine different whole-body gestures,
ranging from pushing, pulling and punching to full-body bowling. The
researchers tested these gestures with five users in a two-bedroom apartment
and an office environment. Out of the 900 gestures performed, WiSee accurately
classified 94 per cent of them.
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