BreathTrack: Tracking Indoor Human Breath Status via Commodity WiFi

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a contact-free breath tracking system, BreathTrack, to track the status of breath using the off-the-shelf WiFi devices. BreathTrack exploits the phase variation of the channel state information (CSI) to track human breath. To resolve the phase distortions introduced by the hardware imperfection of the commodity WiFi chips, BreathTrack utilizes both the hardware and software correction methods. The time-invariant PLL phase offset is calibrated by the hardware correction using cables and splitters, while the time-varying carrier frequency offset, sampling frequency offset and packet detection delay are removed by the software corrections using the phase difference between the CSI at the receiver antennas and that at the reference antenna connected from the transmitter. Moreover, BreathTrack utilizes the sparse recovery method to find the dominant path in the multipath indoor environment and derive the corresponding complex attenuation coefficient. Then, the phase variation of the complex attenuation coefficient is utilized to extract the detailed breath status and the breath rate. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that BreathTrack could estimate the breath rate with the median accuracy of over 99% in most scenarios, and could track the detailed status of breath directly using the raw phase variation.