OPTICS: Human Activity-Aware Integrated Optical Wireless Communication and Sensing

Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) is emerging as$a$promising complementary technology for 6G and beyond, with a significant increase in research focused on optical-based communication and sensing in recent years. However, until now, these two applications are still being investigated separately within the same system, which hinders further performance improvements. Moreover, the high directionality and low penetration characteristics of optical signals can lead to frequent interruptions caused by human activities, posing significant challenges for both communication and sensing tasks. In this paper, we present OPTICS: an Optical-based Integrated Communication and Sensing (OPTICS) system that seamlessly integrates optical wireless communication and sensing to create a synergistic benefit for both functions. To achieve this, OPTICS analyzes the received signal patterns to identify human activities and dynamically modifies the transmitted optical signals to simultaneously preserve communication quality and enhance human activity recognition. We implemented OPTICS using off-the-shelf devices and conducted extensive evaluations under various real-world scenarios. The results demonstrate that OPTICS can effectively improve original OWC reliability and throughput while achieving up to 99.1% accuracy in human activity recognition.