WiSenseHub: Architecture to deploy a building-scale WiFi-sensing system

The smart buildings of the future need to understand the movement and occupancy of the people in the environment. Using cameras to provide this context can be privacy-invasive. Alternatively, installing dedicated hardware to sense the environment can be cost-prohibitive and limit ubiquitous adoption. WiFi-based sensing has hence been championed to provide this building-scale sensing, as it allows for both privacy and is ubiquitously deployed in most buildings. However, industry-translatable research in this space has been challenging as no building-scale systems can provide WiFi sensing data. Consequently, many real-world challenges of deploying these sensing systems remain a mystery. To overcome this veil of mystery, we develop and open-source WiSenseHub, a building-scale WiFi-sensing system. We build our system on commercially available WiFi radios, deploy our backend services to collect data on infinitely scalable AWS cloud or a local server desktop, and build a front-end phone-based interface to collect diverse WiFi sensing data. We deployed multiple WiFi radios in our building and collected data for user devices for over 38 hours.