Monitoring Vital Signs and Postures During Sleep Using WiFi Signals

Abstract

Tracking human sleeping postures and vital signs of breathing and heart rates during sleep is important as it can help to assess the general physical health of a person and provide useful clues for diagnosing possible diseases. Traditional approaches (e.g., polysomnography) are limited to clinic usage. Recent radio frequency-based approaches require specialized devices or dedicated wireless sensors and are only able to track breathing rate. In this paper, we propose to track the vital signs of both breathing rate and heart rate during sleep by using off-the-shelf WiFi without any wearable or dedicated devices. Our system reuses existing WiFi network and exploits the fine-grained channel information to capture the minute movements caused by breathing and heart beats. Our system thus has the potential to be widely deployed and perform continuous long-term monitoring. The developed algorithm makes use of the channel information in both time and frequency domain to estimate breathing and heart rates, and it works well when either individual or two persons are in bed. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our system can accurately capture vital signs during sleep under realistic settings, and achieve comparable or even better performance comparing to traditional and existing approaches, which is a strong indication of providing noninvasive, continuous fine-grained vital signs monitoring without any additional cost.