COVID-Safe Spatial Occupancy Monitoring Using OFDM-Based Features and Passive WiFi Samples

During the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities have been asking for social distancing to prevent transmission of the virus. However, enforcing such distancing has been challenging in tight spaces such as elevators and unmonitored commercial settings such as offices. This article addresses this gap by proposing a low-cost and non-intrusive method for monitoring social distancing within a given space, using Channel State Information (CSI) from passive WiFi sensing. By exploiting the frequency selective behavior of CSI with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, we achieve an improvement in accuracy over existing crowd counting works. Our system counts the number of occupants with a 93% accuracy rate in an elevator setting and predicts whether the COVID-Safe limit is breached with a 97% accuracy rate. We also demonstrate the occupant counting capability of the system in a commercial office setting, achieving 97% accuracy. Our proposed occupancy monitoring outperforms existing methods by at least 7%. Overall, the proposed framework is inexpensive, requiring only one device that passively collects data and a lightweight supervised learning algorithm for prediction. Our lightweight model and accuracy improvements are necessary contributions for WiFi-based counting to be suitable for COVID-specific applications.(1)