Smart Homes that Monitor Breathing and Heart Rate

By Fadel M. Adib, Hongzi Mao, Zachary Kabelac, Dina Katabi, Rob Miller. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015

907 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The evolution of ubiquitous sensing technologies has led to intelligent environments that can monitor and react to our daily activities, such as adapting our heating and cooling systems, responding to our gestures, and monitoring our elderly. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible for smart environments to monitor our vital signs remotely, without instrumenting our bodies. We introduce Vital-Radio, a wireless sensing technology that monitors breathing and heart rate without body contact. Vital-Radio exploits the fact that wireless signals are affected by motion in the environment, including chest movements due to inhaling and exhaling and skin vibrations due to heartbeats. We describe the operation of Vital-Radio and demonstrate through a user study that it can track users' breathing and heart rates with a median accuracy of 99%, even when users are 8~meters away from the device, or in a different room. Furthermore, it can monitor the vital signs of multiple people simultaneously. We envision that Vital-Radio can enable smart homes that monitor people's vital signs without body instrumentation, and actively contribute to their inhabitants' well-being.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f87945b3e6a5c7cba3f4f7257dafffb5ed2f3bd

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Citations in the corpus

Human respiration detection with commodity wifi devices: do user location and body orientation matter? (2016, methodology): “In the past years, various RF-based approaches ranging from Doppler radar [7], UWB radar [8], FMCW radar [3] to USRP based solutions [9] have been explored to sense the human respiration rate.”
Smart Homes for Elderly Healthcare—Recent Advances and Research Challenges (2017, background): “Another non-contact vital signs monitoring system was proposed in [129] that Figure 8.”
RF-based 3D skeletons (2018, background): “Different papers localize the people in the environment [2, 17], monitor their walking speed [15, 31], track their chest motion to extract breathing and heartbeats [3, 39, 41], or track the arm motion to identify a particular gesture [21, 23].”
Emotion recognition using wireless signals (2016, methodology): “The FMCW radio connects to a computer over Ethernet.”
Towards 3D human pose construction using wifi (2020, background): “WiFi Sensing: Recently, a considerable number of investigations are conducted to make use ofWiFi devices to enable various sensing tasks, including indoor localization and tracking [5, 22, 25, 33, 39, 42, 48–50, 52, 53, 65], walking speed estimation [17, 43], breathing and heartbeats inference [6, 5”
PhaseBeat: Exploiting CSI Phase Data for Vital Sign Monitoring with Commodity WiFi Devices (2017, methodology): “For example, the Vital-Radio system uses a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar to estimate breathing and heart rates [5].”
Through-Wall Human Pose Estimation Using Radio Signals (2018, background): “Different papers either localize the whole body [5, 23], monitor the person’s walking speed [43, 19], track the chest motion to extract breathing and heartbeats [6, 51, 52], or track the arm motion to identify a particular gesture [32, 26].”
Wireless Sensing for Human Activity: A Survey (2020, background): “Vital-Radio [56] uses FMCW radar to separate the reflections from different objects as different buckets depending on the distance between these objects and the device.”