Acceleration Estimation of Signal Propagation Path Length Changes for Wireless Sensing

As indoor applications grow in diversity, wireless sensing, vital in areas like localization and activity recognition, is attracting renewed interest. Indoor wireless sensing relies on signal processing, particularly channel state information (CSI) based signal parameter estimation. Nonetheless, regarding reflected signals induced by dynamic human targets, no satisfactory algorithm yet exists for estimating the acceleration of dynamic path length change (DPLC), which is crucial for various sensing tasks in this context. Hence, this paper proposes DP-AcE, a CSI based DPLC acceleration estimation algorithm. We first model the relationship between the phase difference of adjacent CSI measurements and the DPLC’s acceleration. Unlike existing works assuming constant speed, DP-AcE considers both speed and acceleration, yielding a more accurate and objective representation. Using this relationship, an algorithm combining scaling with Fourier transform is proposed to realize acceleration estimation. We evaluate DP-AcE via the acceleration estimation and acceleration-based fall detection with the collected CSI. Experimental results reveal that, using distance as the metric, DP-AcE achieves a median acceleration estimation percentage error of 4.38%. Furthermore, in multi-target scenarios, the fall detection achieves an average true positive rate of 89.56% and a false positive rate of 11.78%, demonstrating its importance in enhancing indoor wireless sensing capabilities.