Wi-Fi sensing addresses the growing need for efficient, real-time monitoring of urban environments, a challenge that cities worldwide face as they continue to expand and evolve. Traditional methods of environmental monitoring, such as standalone sensors or cameras, often require substantial infrastructure and maintenance, making them costly and energy-intensive. Wi-Fi sensing, however, provides a sophisticated solution by leveraging existing wireless communication networks to perform dual functions: data collection and transmission. This not only reduces the need for separate sensor networks but also enhances the ability of urban planners and environmental managers to monitor various aspects of city life seamlessly.
At its core, Wi-Fi sensing relies on the latest advancements in integrated sensing and communication technologies, particularly those emerging with the advent of 6G networks. These networks are designed to simultaneously collect data (sensing) and transmit it (communication), all within the same infrastructure. For example, Wi-Fi signals can be used to detect changes in the environment, such as variations in humidity, temperature, or even the presence of people in a space. This data is then instantly communicated to relevant systems or authorities, enabling real-time responses. The efficiency of this system is further enhanced by its ability to reduce energy consumption and the use of silicon, making it not only a powerful tool but also an environmentally sustainable one.
By enabling more precise and dynamic environmental monitoring, this technology can play a crucial role in smart agriculture, helping to optimise water usage and crop management. It also offers significant benefits for environmental conservation, allowing for the continuous observation of natural habitats and the early detection of ecological changes. In urban planning, Wi-Fi sensing provides planners with detailed, real-time insights into how spaces are used, which can inform decisions on topics such as traffic management and public safety.
The specific task group within IEEE working to standardize WLAN sensing.
Develops 'WiFi Motion' software that turns connected devices into motion sensors.
United States · Startup
Pioneer in Wi-Fi Sensing technology, developing the 'Time Reversal Machine' technology that enables Wi-Fi signals to detect motion, breathing, and falls.
Canada · Startup
Provides AI-based Wi-Fi sensing solutions for telecare and security, focusing on elder care monitoring without wearables.
Research lab hosting Josh Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science group, a leader in probabilistic programming and neuro-symbolic models.
Provides smart home services suites to ISPs, including motion detection via WiFi.
Develops a digital sensing platform that uses Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) for security and automation.
Industrial research lab with a history of fundamental research in condensed matter physics relevant to topological phases.
Develops silicon spin qubits using advanced 300mm wafer manufacturing processes.
Paper
IEEE 802.11af-enabled scalable cognitive radio sensor networks with adaptive priority management for early forest fire forewarningScientific Reports · Oct 23, 2025
Proposes a Cognitive Radio Sensor Network utilizing IEEE 802.11af technology for forest fire early warning, integrating temperature and smoke sensing with dynamic spectrum access to ensure reliable emergency notifications.
Paper
Beyond Connectivity: Investigating the Temperature Sensing Capacity of Modern Wi-FiHeriot-Watt Research Portal · Jun 15, 2025
Investigates the use of Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) for ambient temperature measurement, achieving high accuracy with machine learning models on ESP32 chipsets.
Article
IEEE 802.11af-enabled scalable cognitive radio sensor networks with adaptive priority management for early forest fire forewarningScientific Reports · Oct 23, 2025
Proposes a system using IEEE 802.11af (Wi-Fi over TV white space) and cognitive radio for early forest fire detection, prioritizing emergency alerts to ensure low latency.
Paper
CSI-Bench: A Large-Scale In-the-Wild Dataset for Multi-task WiFi SensingarXiv · May 1, 2025
Presents CSI-Bench, a large-scale benchmark dataset collected using commercial Wi-Fi edge devices across 26 diverse indoor environments, supporting tasks like fall detection, breathing monitoring, and localization.
Article
IEEE P802.11 - TASK GROUP BF (WLAN SENSING) - MEETING UPDATEieee802.org
Article
What Is Wi-Fi Sensing?nami.ai
Wi-Fi sensing is a new technology, revolutionizing the way we think about smart homes and smart buildings. Wi-Fi sensing uses Wi-Fi waves to detect motion and presence and then applies machine learning algorithms in order to facilitate advanced applications.
Article
How Wi-Fi sensing became usable techtechnologyreview.com
After a decade of obscurity, the technology is being used to track people’s movements.
Article
Wi-Fi Sensing: Applications and Challengesarxiv.org
Wi-Fi technology has strong potentials in indoor and outdoor sensing applications, it has several important features which makes it an appealing option compared to other sensing technologies. This paper presents a survey on different applications of Wi-Fi based sensing systems such as elderly people monitoring, activity classification, gesture recognition, people counting, through the wall sensing, behind the corner sensing, and many other applications. The challenges and interesting future directions are also highlighted.
Article
Article Sensing WiFi packets in the air: Practicality and implications in urban mobility monitoringresearchgate.net
Mobile sensing systems employ various sensors in smartphones to extract human-related information. As the demand for sensing systems increases, a more effective mechanism is required to sense information about human life. In this paper, we present a systematic study on the feasibility and gaining properties of a crowdsensing system that primarily concerns sensing WiFi packets in the air. We propose that this method is effective for estimating urban mobility by using only a small number of participants. During a seven-week deployment, we collected smartphone sensor data, including approximately four million WiFi packets from more than 130,000 unique devices in a city. Our analysis of this dataset examines core issues in urban mobility monitoring, including feasibility, spatio-temporal coverage, scalability, and threats to privacy. Collectively, our findings provide valuable insights to guide the development of new mobile sensing systems for urban life monitoring.
Article
From Internet of Things sensors and open data platforms to urban observatoriespure.tudelft.nl
Digitalisation and the Internet of Things (IoT) help city councils improve services, increase productivity and reduce costs. City‐scale monitoring of traffic and pollution enables the development of insights into low‐air quality areas and the introduction of improvements. IoT provides a platform for the intelligent interconnection of everyday objects and has become an integral part of a citizen's life. Anyone can monitor from their fitness to the air quality of their immediate environment using everyday technologies. With caveats around privacy and accuracy, such data could even complement those collected by authorities at city‐scale, for validating or improving policies. The authors explore the hierarchies of urban sensing from citizen‐to city‐scale, how sensing at different levels may be interlinked, and the challenges of managing the urban IoT. The authors provide examples from the UK, map the data generation processes across levels of urban hierarchies and discuss the role of emerging sociotechnical urban sensing infrastructures, that is, independent, open, and transparent capabilities that facilitate stakeholder engagement and collection and curation of grassroots data. The authors discuss how such capabilities can become a conduit for the alignment of community‐ and city‐level action via an example of tracking the use of shared electric bicycles in Bristol, UK.
Article
How Wi-Fi sensing simplifies presence detectionedn.com
The emerging technology of Wi-Fi sensing promises significant benefits for a variety of embedded and edge systems. Using only the radio signals already generated by Wi-Fi interfaces under normal operation, Wi-Fi sensing can theoretically enable an embedded device to detect the presence of humans, estimate their motion, approximate their location, and even sense gestures and subtle movements, such as breathing and heartbeats.
Article
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024 | World Economic Forumweforum.org
The Top 10 Emerging Technologies report is a vital source of strategic intelligence. First published in 2011, it draws on insights from scientists, researchers and futurists to identify 10 technologies poised to significantly influence societies and economies. These emerging technologiesare disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to achieve considerable scale within five years. This edition expands its analysis by involving over 300 experts from the Forum’s Global Future Councils and a global network of comprising over 2,000 chief editors worldwide from top institutions through Frontiers, a leading publisher of academic research.
Article
The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communicationstaceyoniot.com
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing.
