Wisture: RNN-based Learning of Wireless Signals for Gesture Recognition in Unmodified Smartphones

This paper introduces Wisture, a new online machine learning solution for recognizing touch-less dynamic hand gestures on a smartphone. Wisture relies on the standard Wi-Fi Received Signal Strength (RSS) using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), thresholding filters and traffic induction. Unlike other Wi-Fi based gesture recognition methods, the proposed method does not require a modification of the smartphone hardware or the operating system, and performs the gesture recognition without interfering with the normal operation of other smartphone applications. We discuss the characteristics of Wisture, and conduct extensive experiments to compare its performance against state-of-the-art machine learning solutions in terms of both accuracy and time efficiency. The experiments include a set of different scenarios in terms of both spatial setup and traffic between the smartphone and Wi-Fi access points (AP). The results show that Wisture achieves an online recognition accuracy of up to 94% (average 78%) in detecting and classifying three hand gestures.