Vibration-based pervasive computing and intelligent sensing

Yandao Huang, Kaishun Wu

Abstract: We are now in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). Various smart devices can upload their sensor data that characterize our physical world’s environment to the server. The researchers benefit from sufficient data to conduct a series of intelligent sensing research, which enhances our daily experience. However, few of the device-free sensing applications using wireless signals have widely penetrated the real-world. In recent years, the underlying property of mechanical vibration is exploited in many sensing applications. Vibration offers a brand new perspective on how we think about intelligent sensing. Leveraging the vibration signal for sensing is possible to break the bottlenecks encountered by other sensing technologies. In this paper, we first provide a technology overview of vibration models and property that has been widely used in recent years. We then survey the existing vibration-based intelligent sensing systems and summarize the representative work in terms of localization, user authentication, health monitoring, and communication. The survey concludes with the key challenges and future research direction of using vibration signals for novel human-centric sensing.