RuView

RuView is an open-source WiFi sensing platform that turns ordinary WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, without a single camera or wearable. With more than 100,000 stars on GitHub and an MIT licence, it is one of the most watched open-source sensing projects of the year, running on low-cost edge hardware.

Overview

Every WiFi router fills a room with radio waves, and people disturb those waves when they move, breathe, or sit still. RuView captures these disturbances as Channel State Information from low-cost ESP32 sensors and interprets them with pretrained machine-learning models. The result is a privacy-preserving system that works through walls and in the dark, with no cloud connection and all processing kept local. A small pretrained model published on Hugging Face handles the core sensing. The project describes itself as beta software, with some accuracy figures still awaiting real-data validation, so treat it as a powerful research and prototyping platform rather than a finished consumer product.

Key Features

• Contactless presence and occupancy: detect people through walls, count them, and track entries and exits from WiFi reflections alone.
• Vital-sign monitoring: measure breathing rate and heart rate without contact, including overnight sleep monitoring.
• Camera-free pose estimation: estimate 17 body keypoints from WiFi signals, using models trained for radio-based dense pose sensing.
• Activity recognition: recognise walking, sitting, gestures, and falls from temporal signal patterns, and maps rooms through radio fingerprinting.
• Self-learning edge AI: the system adapts to each new environment locally, using spiking neural networks that adjust in under 30 seconds.
• A large edge-module catalogue: more than 100 ready modules span health, security, building, retail, industrial, research, and AI use cases, all running on the sensor itself.
• Smart-home integration: connect to Home Assistant through MQTT, or to Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa through a Matter bridge, with voice-ready presence and vitals by room.

Pricing

RuView is free and open source under the MIT licence. There are no cloud fees and no internet connection is required. The only cost is optional hardware: an ESP32 sensor node can cost as little as nine dollars, so a home or laboratory setup stays inexpensive.

Who Is It For

RuView is for smart-home builders who want presence sensing without cameras, researchers working on radio sensing, and developers building elder-care, health-monitoring, security, or building-automation systems. It also suits makers and students experimenting with WiFi sensing on cheap hardware.