Privacy-Enhanced Federated WiFi Sensing for Health Monitoring in the Internet of Things

Lian, Zhuotao and Zeng, Qingkui and Liu, Zhusen and Wang, Haoda and Ma, Chuan and Meng, Weizhi and Su, Chunhua and Sakuraiz, Kouichi (2025) Privacy-Enhanced Federated WiFi Sensing for Health Monitoring in the Internet of Things. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 12 (3). pp. 2994-3002. ISSN 2327-4662

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Abstract

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the widespread use of WiFi-enabled consumer electronic devices, which are now common in everyday life. These advancements in IoT have greatly improved data collection and analysis capabilities, especially for health monitoring applications. However, traditional centralized machine learning methods often fall short, raising significant privacy concerns and requiring extensive data collection, which is inefficient. To address these limitations within the distributed IoT environment, this paper presents a federated learning-based WiFi sensing system specifically designed for health monitoring. By enabling local model training, our system prevents the sharing of sensitive data, thus reducing the risk of privacy breaches. We further enhance our system with a secret sharing mechanism coupled with model sparsification to significantly improve privacy. Additionally, our improved Top-k model sparsification algorithm, equipped with adaptive residuals, reduces communication overhead while ensuring high accuracy. Extensive testing across various datasets and models confirms that our system outperforms existing benchmarks in terms of privacy protection and communication efficiency, marking a substantial advancement in health monitoring within the IoT.