LiveSense: A Real-Time Wi-Fi Sensing Platform for Range-Doppler on COTS Laptop

TL;DR

LiveSense transforms a standard Wi-Fi NIC in a laptop into a real-time, centimeter-level Range-Doppler sensing platform capable of detecting motion, gestures, and respiration with high accuracy.

Contribution

This paper introduces LiveSense, a novel system that enables real-time range and Doppler sensing using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware on laptops, combining communication and sensing functionalities.

Findings

Achieves centimeter-level range and velocity estimation with standard Wi-Fi hardware.

Provides real-time range, Doppler, and micro-motion detection capabilities.

First demo to accurately extract range information from commercial Wi-Fi signals.

Abstract

We present LiveSense - a cross-platform that transforms a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi Network Interface Card (NIC) on a laptop into a centimeter-level Range-Doppler sensor while preserving simultaneous communication capability. The laptops are equipped with COTS Intel AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E) or Intel BE201 (Wi-Fi 7) NICs. LiveSense can (i) Extract fully-synchronized channel state information (CSI) at >= 40 Hz, (ii) Perform time-phase alignment and self-interference cancellation on-device, and (iii) Provide a real-time stream of range, Doppler, subcarrier magnitude/phase and annotated video frames to a Python/Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI). The demo will showcase the ability to detect (i) Distance and radial velocity of attendees within a few meters of the device, (ii) Micro-motion (respiration), and (iii) Hand-gesture ranging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever demo to obtain accurate range information of targets from commercial Wi-Fi, despite the limited 160 MHz bandwidth.