The Paradigm of Massive Wireless Human Sensing: Concept, Architecture and Challenges

This article is a position paper which introduces the paradigm of ``Massive Wireless Human Sensing'', i.e. an infrastructure for wireless human sensing based on a plethora of heterogeneous wireless communication signals. More specifically, we aim to exploit signal diversity in the time, frequency, and space domains using opportunistically both device-free and device-based wireless sensing approaches, with the objective of enhancing human sensing capabilities in terms of accuracy and service availability over different environments. The enabling element of this concept is the massive wireless human sensing edge device, that is, an embedded system acting as a multi-technology and multi-approach RF receiver with feature extraction functionality, located within the monitoring area or at its borders. In this framework, architecture solutions and challenges are discussed to lead the future development of this new paradigm.