Introduction

System for the detection of the movement of any person based on the perturbation of the radio signals received by a radio device (e.g., smart phone) connected to a cellular wireless wide area network (WWAN). The invention enables any cellular phone to act as motion sensing device using the built-in functionalities of mobility system in any mobile phone as this is intrinsic in the GSM/UMTS/LTE standards and therefore in any future standard related to cellular WWAN networks.

Technical features

The invention is characterised by: A broadcast signal collecting the set of active transmitters surrounding one device; Receiving the cellular signal quality (CSQ) from each of the active transmitters and collecting this information into a  Table of CSQ state; Transmitting the Table of CSQ state to a back-end server hosted at a cloud datacenter for cloud processing; Receiving from the cloud a set of location-specific motion detection parameters, in the form of manipulated Table of CSQ as well as some thresholds/parameters to manipulate the Table of CSQ locally, and forwarding these parameters to the radio device requesting the use of the movement detection tool.

Possible Applications

• Occupancy and proximity detection, based on the aggregated analysis of the multi-link CSQ data from multiple WWAN enabled devices
• Proximity-based services;
• in IoT scenarios: smart building energy management based on occupancy;
• Always-on sensing without any explicit user intervention or additional battery usage.

Advantages

• Cellular radios (e.g., 2G, 3G or LTE) are never really disconnected. Even in idle mode, they carry out continuous and autonomous measurements of the radio channel conditions;
• The availability of such a new paradigm offers an additional, truly ubiquitous and unobtrusive, capability that gives any device the ability to sense its surrounding space, as well as any physical relationship with the use, when mobile device is still.