Contactless WiFi Sensing and Monitoring for Future Healthcare - Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

WiFi sensing has received recent and significant interest from academia, industry, healthcare professionals, and other caregivers (including family members) as a potential mechanism to monitor our aging population at a distance without deploying devices on users’ bodies. In particular, these methods have the potential to detect critical events such as falls, sleep disturbances, wandering behavior, respiratory disorders, and abnormal cardiac activity experienced by vulnerable people. The interest in such WiFi-based sensing systems arises from practical advantages including its ease of operation indoors as well as ready compliance from monitored individuals. Unlike other sensing methods, such as wearables, camera-based imaging, and acoustic-based solutions, WiFi technology is easy to implement and unobtrusive. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art research on collecting and analyzing channel state information extracted using ubiquitous WiFi signals, describing a range of healthcare applications and identifying a series of open research challenges, including untapped areas of research and related trends. This work aims to provide an overarching view in understanding the technology and discusses its use-cases from a perspective that considers hardware, advanced signal processing, and data acquisition.