Involving ultra-wideband in consumer-level devices into the ecosystem of wireless sensing

Abstract

Among various wireless sensing modalities, Ultra-Wideband (UWB) exhibits unique advantages such as fine granularity owing to its super large bandwidth (500 MHz - 2 GHz). Though promising, UWB sensing was only demonstrated on dedicated hardware including DW1000 and XETHRU X4 which are not available in existing consumer-level devices. In the last few years, we observed an interesting trend of UWB module being embedded into consumer-level devices such as smartphones and smart watches. However, leveraging UWB module inside consumer-level devices for sensing poses new challenges. One key challenge is that while dedicated UWB hardware can present us with raw physical-layer signal amplitude and phase, only upper-layer distance and angle information can be extracted from consumer-level devices. In this demo, we address the challenges and present the first UWB sensing system hosted on iPhone and Apple Watch without any dedicated hardware components. We show that with just the upper-layer UWB data reported from smartphones, exciting sensing applications such as fine-grained 3D handwriting and multi-target tracking can be realized, pushing RF sensing one step forward towards real-life adoption.