RF-Ear: Contactless Multi-device Vibration Sensing and Identification Using COTS RFID

Mechanical vibration sensing/monitoring plays a critical role in today’s industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Existing solutions usually involve directly attaching sensors to the target objects, which is invasive and may affect the operations of delicate devices. Non-invasive approaches such as video and laser methods have drawbacks in that, the former incurs poor performance in low light conditions, while the latter has difficulties to monitor multiple objects simultaneously.In this work, we design RF-Ear, a contactless vibration sensing system using Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID hardware. RF-Ear could accurately monitor the mechanical vibrations of multiple (up to 8) devices using a single tag: it can clearly tell which object is vibrating at what frequency without attaching tags on any device. RF-Ear can measure the vibration frequency up to 400Hz with a mean error rate of 0.2%. Our evaluation results show that RF-Ear can effectively detect 0.2cm screw loose with 90% accuracy. We further employ each device’s unique vibration fingerprint to identify and differentiate devices of exactly the same model. We also show that RF-ear can monitor not just the vibrations but also a large range of mechanical motions. Comprehensive experiments conducted in a real power plant demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with outstanding performance.