The goal of the HOLDEN – Ethical Design of Holography with Dense wireless Networks project is to develop innovative technological solutions for sensing objects, subjects and gestures that are privacy-preserving and ethically compliant. While RF-based sensing technologies enable personalized services such as smart living, automated logistics, or interaction through free-space gestures, they also pose a potential threat to privacy and raise ethical issues.
In this context, applying the privacy by design principle, which aims to ensure the existence of a proper level of privacy and protection of personal data from the design stage, HOLDEN proposes a radically new approach to the problem, exploring the social aspects of RF-based sensing and developing technological solutions that comply with ethical and privacy constraints.
More specifically, the project will develop a system of distributed multi-antenna devices for simultaneous multitarget recognition and ubiquitous perception with unprecedented accuracy. HOLDEN will achieve this goal along three complementary, and privacy-centric paths:
- Continuous-space measurement points: Radio-based 3D vision by holographic image processing of RF wavefronts.
- Discrete-space measurement points: Advanced 3D beamforming for human-scale recognition and tracking through dense massive connected antenna arrays.
- Signal processing and learning: High-dimensional tensor processing for the distinction of complex activities and motion from massive-dimensional RF data.
In addition to the Politecnico di Milano, the project also involves Aalto University, the National Research Council, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Twente and Adant, a company specializing in the design and manufacturing of adaptive wireless systems.
