A cots (uhf) rfid floor for device-free ambient assisted living monitoring

Abstract

The complexity and the intrusiveness of current proposals for AAL monitoring negatively impact end-user acceptability, and ultimately still hinder widespread adoption by key stakeholders (e.g. public and private sector care providers) who seek to balance system usefulness with upfront installation and long-term configuration and maintenance costs. We present the results of our experiments with a device-free wireless sensing (DFWS) approach utilising commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) equipment. Our system is based on antennas above the ceiling and a dense deployment of passive RFID tags under the floor. We provide baseline performance of state of the art machine learning techniques applied to a region-level localisation task. We describe the dataset, which we collected in a realistic testbed, and which we share with the community. Contrary to past work with similar systems, our dataset was collected in a realistic domestic environment over a number of days. The data highlights the potential but also the problems that need to be solved before RFID DFWS approaches can be used for long-term AAL monitoring.