Robust, wide-area sensing of human environments has been a long-standing research goal. We present Sozu, a new low-cost sensing system that can detect a wide range of events wirelessly, through walls and without line of sight, at whole-building scale. To achieve this in a battery-free manner, Sozu tags convert energy from activities that they sense into RF broadcasts, acting like miniature self-powered radio stations. We describe the results from a series of iterative studies, culminating in a deployment study with 30 instrumented objects. Results show that Sozu is very accurate, with true positive event detection exceeding 99%, with almost no false positives. Beyond event detection, we show that Sozu can be extended to detect richer signals, such as the state, intensity, count, and rate of events.

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