Respiration rate is an essential vital indicator for health monitoring. While traditional sensor-based methods support acceptable sensing performance, the recent advance in wireless sensing could enable sensor-free and contact-free respiration sensing, which is particularly important during the practice of social distancing against a pandemic like COVID-19. Among a variety of wireless technologies employed for respiration sensing, Wi-Fi-based solutions are most popular due to the pervasive development of infrastructure. However, the existing Wi-Fi-based approaches need to retrieve Wi-Fi readings from access points, which are not often accessible for the end users. In this article, we propose a novel system, MoBreath, in which we utilize the Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) readings extracted from the end-user device, a smartphone, to monitor the respiration rate for the first time. We introduce and address unique technical challenges, such as selecting the optimum CSI subcarriers from many noisy candidates and providing smartphone placement strategies for both single and multiple human target scenarios based on the Fresnel zone model to support highly accurate respiration sensing. Our evaluation of MoBreath using commodity smartphones in different environments shows that it can accurately estimate the respiration rate at a low error rate of 0.34 breaths per minute and support the sensing range of up to 3–4 m. Even for challenging scenarios such as the target is covered by a quilt and multiple targets are in the sensing area, MoBreath can still support highly accurate results.

Visible light technology shows great potential in the underground mine positioning today. Most visible light-based underground positioning technology deploy the receiver, such as photodiodes (PDs), on the mine tunnel ground and consider the miner’s lamp on the ceiling as the transmitter. This incurs the unreliable reception of visible light signals and the difficult implementation of VLP systems due to the complex underground mine environment, such as the receiver being obscured or trampled by objects (e.g., Minecarts and Ore). We present a reliable underground positioning algorithm with visible light considering the actual mine environment. The key innovation is that we design a novel reverse mechanism, i.e., utilizing the existing miner’s headlamp as the transmitter for broadcasting the specific light beacon representing the mine’s identity information, and the PDs deployed on the ceiling of the mine tunnel as the receiver for optical signal reception. We can infer the current locations of all miners using a series of base stations constructed by PDs. If some special mine environment limits the large-scale deployment of base stations and causes the positioning blind spots, the inertial navigation is combined to achieve all miners’ real-time positioning. We overcome some technical challenges for this new mechanism and the underground mine environment, such as optimal frequency selection, robust frequency identification, and accurate base station positioning. We conduct extensive experiments on our algorithm in a simulated mine tunnel, and the experimental results verify that our algorithm exhibits good performance.

Indoor localization technology plays an important role in many indoor application scenarios. Existing WiFi-based indoor localization methods mainly obtain channel state information (CSI) through the personal computer, or obtain coarse-grained received signal strength (RSS) through the smartphone to finish the localization. Little work has been done on using smartphones to obtain fine-grained channel state information for localization. In this paper, we use the smartphone to collect fine-grained CSI that is more convenient and applicable, and propose a indoor fingerprinting localization. Compared with the CSI collected by the computer, the CSI signal collected by the smartphone fluctuates greatly. Hence, we corrects the CSI data through the signal processing technique and selects optimal subcarriers to obtain more stable and effective signals. In order to cope with the noisy WiFi environment, the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) method is used to remove abnormal sample points to reduce environmental interference. Moreover, the support vector machine multi-classification method is used for training and classification to achieve localization. Finally, we use the Google Nexus 5 smartphone to conduct experiments in two typical indoor environments. The localization accuracy is 91% and 86%, respectively, and both average localization errors are less than 0.5m. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has higher localization accuracy compared with the typical algorithms.

The prevalence of illumination equipment and the inherent advantages of the Visible Light Communication (VLC) technique have resulted in a growing interest in Visible Light Positioning (VLP). There exist many excellent VLP techniques over the past several years. However, one limitation of most VLP survey works is that they mainly focus on the analysis from the perspective of techniques but ignore the equally important hardware aspect, since the hardware part directly affects the performance and cost of VLP systems and also determines whether it can be put into practical use. Different from most surveys concentrating on a single perspective, we provide an intensive overview of VLP systems from software algorithms to hardware devices. A novel‐innovative classification method is used in the software algorithms, while the hardware aspect is introduced in terms of transmitters, modems, and receivers, making up for the deficiencies of the previous works. Massive papers including pioneering papers and the state‐of‐the‐art ones in related areas are gathered and categorized. These solutions have also been evaluated in terms of accuracy, cost, range, and complexity. Furthermore, current open issues and tendencies regarding VLP are also illustrated in this paper.

The precise tracking of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in coal mines remains a challenging task that faces strict energy constraints. The existing approaches mainly focus on achieving better accuracy but ignore energy consumption. This article proposes an on-demand precise tracking (OPT) framework based on the fusion of the ultrawideband (UWB) and inertial measurement unit (IMU). The fusion unscented Kalman filter (fusion UKF) is devised for energy-efficient tracking with customized performance. First, OPT provides an adaptive adjustment mechanism of UWB signal transmission to trade off between accuracy and energy consumption for UAV local positioning in coal mines. Second, we propose an on-demand trigger algorithm for UAV remote tracking to determine whether the data are transmitted to the ground server. Especially, the on-demand trigger condition is ameliorated due to the existence of packet drops in complicated coal mines. Finally, extensive simulations in the Gazebo Platform and field experiments utilizing P440 UWB nodes in the indoor and coal mine laboratories have been conducted to verify the feasibility. Results show that OPT is efficient and practical and balances the performance and energy consumption under appropriate parameters. Compared with the existing event-triggered extended Kalman filter (ET-EKF) scheme, the accuracy is improved by 10.3%, and the communication rate is contracted by 11.4% in the coal mine environment.