Smart Homes that Monitor Breathing and Heart Rate

Abstract

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.

Activity and Emotion Recognition for Elderly Health Monitoring

“…Heart beat rate is a very strong indicator of emotions [31], another source of data is the breath rate. The combination of both information is used in several researches of emotion recognition.…”

Utilizing an Ingestible Biosensor to Assess Real-Time Medication Adherence

“…Battery-powered ingestible devices similar to pill endoscopy capsules can be developed with improved range and signal duration, but are limited by the physical size of components [16,17]. Integration of receiver sensors in homes, hospitals, and chronic care facilities where patients tend to ingest their medications may allow for elimination of worn receivers and improved adherence to ingestible systems [18]. Clinical implementation of real-time medication adherence monitoring systems including ingestible biosensors relies heavily upon patient acceptability.…”

RSS-based respiratory rate monitoring using periodic Gaussian processes and Kalman filtering

“…Measuring the propagation delay is possible for example with ultra-wideband radios [4] and frequency modulated carrier wave radars [6]. These works show that respiration rate can be estimated with high accuracy and the technologies can also be used to estimate the heart rate.…”

“…Such sensors are unsuitable in home healthcare applications since the person's mobility is restricted, an elderly suffering from dementia may forget to wear a sensor, and infants may remove them. An alternative is to use non-invasive methods that do not rely on body contact and popular approaches include vision-based techniques [3] and radio frequency (RF)-based methods [4]- [6], a research topic we explore in this work.…”