Monitoring Engagement in Online Classes Through WiFi CSI

ABSTRACT

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people have been forced to move to online spaces to attend classes or meetings and so on. The effectiveness of online classes depends on the engagement level of students. A straightforward way to monitor the engagement is to observe students' facial expressions, eye gazes, head gesticulations, hand movements, and body movements through their video feed. However, video-based engagement detection has limitations, such as being influenced by video backgrounds, lighting conditions, camera angles, unwillingness to open the camera, etc. In this work, we propose a non-intrusive mechanism of estimating engagement level by monitoring the head gesticulations through channel state information (CSI) of WiFi signals. First, we conduct an anonymous survey to investigate whether the head gesticulation pattern is correlated with engagement. We then develop models to recognize head gesticulations through CSI. Later, we plan to correlate the head gesticulation pattern with the instructor's intent to estimate the students' engagement. © 2023 IEEE.