Sensing without cameras.
Presence, motion and occupancy read from the ordinary WiFi already present in a space. No lens. No image. No per-person identity. WiFi Sensing extends Ithildin Alpine — tactical edge vision and sensor fusion — into rooms where a camera is the wrong instrument, legally or operationally.
Module of Ithildin Alpine → · results flow into the same ontology
A moving body perturbs a WiFi signal. Ordinary WiFi radios continuously measure Channel State Information — the fine-grained amplitude and phase of the signal across each subcarrier. When a person moves through a space, they change how those signals reflect, scatter and fade. A model trained on CSI reads that disturbance as activity.
The output is a coarse, physical estimate — not a picture. Ithildin's analytics layer turns the raw CSI stream into stable, explainable events: someone is here, something is moving, a zone is occupied, an activity is broadly underway.
What it reads
- Presence — is a space occupied or empty
- Motion — is something moving, and roughly where
- Occupancy — how many distinct zones are active
- Coarse activity — broad movement state (still / walking / disturbance)
What it does NOT do
- No pose or skeleton reconstruction
- No vital-signs or biometric inference
- No identification of specific individuals
- No imaging — there is no picture to recover
WiFi sensing cannot run from a browser or the cloud alone. Channel State Information only exists where a radio physically sits in the space being sensed. There is no remote shortcut — if no instrumented radio is in the room, there is nothing to read.
So the customer owns and installs an on-site capture appliance: an ESP32-S3 sensor mesh or a Nexmon-patched Raspberry Pi. Detection runs locally on that appliance. Only aggregate events leave the device — never raw CSI, never a reconstructable signal. Ithildin supplies the AI and analytics layer plus the dashboard that turns those events into an operational picture. The hardware stays with the customer; the intelligence is ours. This mirrors the model proven across the commercial industry.
On-site capture · aggregate-out
Caption · Hardware is the customer's. The AI layer is ours.
WiFi sensing is not speculative. It is an established research field, a published IEEE standard, and a product category already shipping in millions of homes. The references below are the industry's — not Ithildin's claims. What we add is the lawful, sovereign, Swiss-deployed analytics layer on top.
DensePose From WiFi
Carnegie Mellon University research demonstrating that human movement can be inferred from commodity WiFi signals — the academic anchor for CSI-based sensing.
IEEE 802.11bf "WLAN Sensing"
A published 2025 IEEE standard that formally defines sensing as a first-class function of WiFi hardware — the category now has a standards body behind it.
Cognitive Systems · WiFi Motion
Motion sensing over existing WiFi, shipped through Comcast / Xfinity and 160+ internet service providers — commercial proof at consumer scale.
Origin AI
A WiFi-sensing company acquired by home-security provider ADT in 2026 — the security industry validating the technology through acquisition.
The customer owns the sensors and the legal basis. Ithildin does not operate a sensing network on anyone's behalf and does not sense any space the customer does not lawfully control. Every deployment is geofenced to customer-controlled boundaries and emits aggregate data only — there is no per-person tracking.
Customer-owned, customer-authorised — the organisation owns the WiFi infrastructure and holds the legal basis for sensing within it.
Geofenced to controlled boundaries — sensing is confined to spaces the customer controls; coverage outside those boundaries is configured off.
Aggregate-only · no per-person tracking — consistent with ArGV3 Art. 26; the system records zone-level events, not individuals.
Swiss nLPD / FADP · balancing of interests — each deployment carries a documented balancing-of-interests assessment and a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).
Through-wall, neighbour and public-space sensing is refused — explicitly out of scope, in the product and in contract. We do not build it.
Enforcement is in the product. The Authorized Deployment Registry records the authorising organ and its mandate before any device is permitted to stream. No registered authorisation, no data flow — the gate is technical, not just a policy promise.
Where a camera is the wrong instrument. WiFi Sensing fits spaces that demand awareness without imaging — each tied to a lawful, customer-owned context with an authorising organ on record.
Perimeter & border-zone intrusion
Movement detection across a mandated, customer-controlled perimeter — intrusion awareness without standing camera coverage of the zone.
Event-security occupancy
Live occupancy and crowd-movement state for an event in a venue the operator controls and consents to instrument.
Critical-infrastructure presence
Presence verification in restricted plant, utility and control rooms where imaging is undesirable or prohibited.
Dark-site security
Motion and occupancy in unmanned or low-light facilities — sensing that works without a camera and without lighting the site.
Sensing that holds up to a Swiss legal review.
We will walk you through the CSI signal chain, the on-site appliance, the aggregate-only data path, and the Authorized Deployment Registry — and exactly where the legal boundaries sit.
Request a technical briefing →