Towards occupant activity driven smart buildings via WiFi-enabled IoT devices and deep learning

With the unprecedented advancement of Internet of Things (IoT), automatic occupant activity recognition is becoming realizable for a myriad of emerging applications in smart buildings for energy efficiency and user experience enhancement. Existing activity recognition approaches require either the deployment of extra infrastructure or the cooperation of occupants to carry dedicated devices, which are expensive, intrusive and inconvenient for pervasive implementation. In this paper, we propose DeepHare, a deep learning-based human activity recognition scheme that can automatically identify common activities using only commodity WiFi-enabled IoT devices. We design a novel OpenWrt-based IoT platform to collect Channel State Information (CSI) measurements from commercial IoT devices. Moreover, an innovative deep learning framework, Autoencoder Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network (AE-LRCN), is proposed. We developed dedicated neural network architectures to sanitize the noise in raw CSI data, extract high-level salient features and reveal the inherent temporal dependencies among data for accurate human activity recognition. All the parameters in AE-LRCN are fine-tuned end-to-end automatically. Extensive experiments are conducted in typical three indoor environments and the experimental results demonstrate that DeepHare outperforms existing methods and achieves a 97.6% activity recognition accuracy without human intervention.