LiveSense: A Real-Time Wi-Fi Sensing Platform for Range-Doppler on COTS Laptop
2026-03-06 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created LiveSense, a system that turns normal Wi-Fi cards in laptops into precise sensors that can measure how far and how fast nearby objects are moving, while still allowing normal Wi-Fi use. Their system works with Intel Wi-Fi 6E and 7 cards and can collect detailed signal information at a high speed. It processes this data on the device to cancel out interference and sends real-time measurements and video to a user interface. The demo shows it can detect distance, breathing motions, and hand gestures within a few meters. This is the first time such accurate range detection has been done using commercial Wi-Fi with limited bandwidth.
Wi-Fi Network Interface Card (NIC)Range-Doppler sensorChannel State Information (CSI)Time-phase alignmentSelf-interference cancellationWi-Fi 6EWi-Fi 7Range detectionDoppler effectMicro-motion sensing
Authors
Jessica Sanson, Rahul C. Shah, Maximilian Pinaroc, Cagri Tanriover, Valerio Frascolla
Abstract
We present LiveSense - a cross-platform that transforms a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi Network Interface Card (NIC) on a laptop into a centimeter-level Range-Doppler sensor while preserving simultaneous communication capability. The laptops are equipped with COTS Intel AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E) or Intel BE201 (Wi-Fi 7) NICs. LiveSense can (i) Extract fully-synchronized channel state information (CSI) at >= 40 Hz, (ii) Perform time-phase alignment and self-interference cancellation on-device, and (iii) Provide a real-time stream of range, Doppler, subcarrier magnitude/phase and annotated video frames to a Python/Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI). The demo will showcase the ability to detect (i) Distance and radial velocity of attendees within a few meters of the device, (ii) Micro-motion (respiration), and (iii) Hand-gesture ranging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever demo to obtain accurate range information of targets from commercial Wi-Fi, despite the limited 160 MHz bandwidth.