Recent developments in sensorless radio frequency (RF) localization have shown immense potential for a wide range of applications. Professor Dina Katabi and her group have developed a particularly promising device. It has achieved unseen levels of accuracy and has been shown to measure faint signals that can be used in seamless medical diagnostic, such as breathing rate or even heart rate. However, its range, resilience to metallic obstacles, and multi-person tracking are limited. This would represent a significant challenge if the device were to be used in constrained densely populated environments, such as assisted living facilities. The problem could be solved by enabling multiple devices to operate in the same environment. However, the devices would interfere with each other and the performance would degrade. Therefore, this project will tackle this challenge by first introducing a simple time-based synchronization scheme. Later, it aims to obtain more information by synchronizing the devices’ clocks. Doing so will permit each device to listen to and differentiate the signals from the other devices. The additional information will be used to enhance the overall performance of the system.

I am participating in SuperUROP because I want to strengthen my knowledge in communications systems development on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and radio frequency (RF) circuit design. Working with this lab in the past year has increased my interest in the subject substantially, and I hope to further my abilities to carry meaningful research within it.