You can detect people’s location in an area with WiFi coverage since years ago. Retailers were looking at it to understand customers’ behavior in their stores. Triangulation over airwaves is not new.
I came across a research paper: Dense Pose From WiFi.
An interesting read.
The basic idea is to determine human pose using inexpensive hardware like WiFi routers.
Here’s what you can do:
Given three WiFi transmitters and three aligned receivers, we can detect and recover dense human pose correspondence in cluttered scenarios with multiple people.
The researcher states that they can do this with a couple of WiFi routers at around 60 US dollars. Interesting.
You can easily detect and monitor people’s behavior using video cameras. It is as cheap as the solution documented by Carnegie Mellon University researchers. The main difference is those video cameras come with more significant privacy problems. People can be identified and tracked over time. Something, I guess, is intended.
The WiFi solution can be considered much more privacy aware than video cameras.
While I was reading the paper, I was impressed by the result. Just look at the pictures in the document to understand the potentiality.
I am impressed by what you can achieve using inexpensive hardware and open-source software. If you have the knowledge, you can build advanced systems that, a few years ago, were available only to big companies and government agencies.
This is really exciting to me.
Here’s the link to the original document: Dense Pose From WiFi