Recent Advances and Challenges in Ubiquitous Sensing

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent progress in ubiquitous sensing, highlighting new paradigms that extend sensing beyond personal domains to environmental and mental activity recognition, and discusses future research challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in ubiquitous sensing, emphasizing new sensing paradigms and future research directions.

Findings

New sensing paradigms utilize environmental noise and third-party systems.

Advances enable sensing of mental activities like emotion and fatigue.

Robustness to process noise improves environmental sensing reliability.

Abstract

Ubiquitous sensing is tightly coupled with activity recognition. This survey reviews recent advances in Ubiquitous sensing and looks ahead on promising future directions. In particular, Ubiquitous sensing crosses new barriers giving us new ways to interact with the environment or to inspect our psyche. Through sensing paradigms that parasitically utilise stimuli from the noise of environmental, third-party pre-installed systems, sensing leaves the boundaries of the personal domain. Compared to previous environmental sensing approaches, these new systems mitigate high installation and placement cost by providing a robustness towards process noise. On the other hand, sensing focuses inward and attempts to capture mental activities such as cognitive load, fatigue or emotion through advances in, for instance, eye-gaze sensing systems or interpretation of body gesture or pose. This survey summarises these developments and discusses current research questions and promising future directions.