IRC Next Steps Plus : OPERA - Opportunistic Passive Radar for Non-Cooperative Contextual Sensing

身体活动和行为是糖尿病、痴呆、抑郁症、慢性阻塞性肺病、关节炎和哮喘等一系列长期慢性健康状况的重要组成部分，英国目前将其全部健康和社会保健预算的70%用于这些类型的疾病。自我保健的所有方面，新的治疗方法或管理条件，都需要新颖的非侵入性技术，能够在很长一段时间内捕获关于病因和症状的重要数据。OPERA项目——用于非合作情境感知的机会性被动雷达——将研究一种用于情境感知的新的不显眼的传感技术——定义为并发的身体活动识别和室内定位——以促进电子医疗保健和环境辅助生活（AAL）的新应用。OPERA平台将集成到“SPHERE长期行为传感机”中，与家中其他各种传感器一起收集信息，以监测和跟踪人们的标志性动作。OPERA系统将围绕无源传感技术建立：一个只有接收器的雷达网络，检测来自人们的环境射频信号的反射——在这种情况下，主要是住宅环境中的WiFi信号。这些机会信号从普通的家庭WiFi接入点传输，但也从其他无线设备传输，这些设备正在成为物联网（IoT）家庭生态系统的一部分。该项目将利用先进的硬件同步技术和最新的测向技术，实现准确的无设备（非合作）人员定位。它还将采用微多普勒雷达信号处理、生物力学建模和机器/深度学习的最新理念，自动识别日常活动（如整理和洗涤）和需要紧急关注的事件（如跌倒）。OPERA预计将克服与最先进的上下文感知技术相关的一些关键障碍。最明显的是对可穿戴设备的不遵守，尤其是在老年人中，以及基于视频的技术的侵入性带来的对隐私的侵犯。

Physical activity and behaviour is a very large component in an array of long-term chronic health conditions such as diabetes, dementia, depression, COPD, arthritis and asthma, and the UK currently spends 70% of its entire health and social care budget on these types of conditions. All aspects of self-care, new therapies or management conditions, require novel non-intrusive technologies able to capture the salient data on causes and symptoms over long periods of time.The OPERA Project - Opportunistic Passive Radar for Non-Cooperative Contextual Sensing - will investigate a new unobtrusive sensing technology for CONTEXUAL SENSING - defined as concurrent physical activity recognition and indoor localisation - to facilitate new applications in e-Healthcare and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The OPERA platform will be integrated into the "SPHERE long term behavioural sensing machine" to gather information alongside various other sensors around the home so as to monitor and track the signature movements of people.The OPERA system will be built around passive sensing technology: a receiver-only radar network that detects the reflections of ambient radio-frequency signals from people - in this case, principally, the WiFi signals in residential environments. These opportunistic signals are transmitted from common household WiFi access points, but also other wireless enabled devices which are becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT) home ecosystem.The project will make use of cutting-edge hardware synchronisation techniques, and recent advances in direction finding techniques to enable accurate device-free (non-cooperative) localisation of people. It will also employ the latest ideas in micro-Doppler radar signal processing, bio-mechanical modelling and machine/deep learning for automatic recognition of both everyday activities e.g. tidying and washing-up, to events which require urgent attention such as falling. OPERA is expected to overcome some of the key barriers associated with the state-of-the-art contextual sensing technologies. Most notably non-compliance with wearable devices, especially amongst the elderly, and the invasion of privacy brought about by the intrusive nature of video based technologies.