Synthesizing Wider WiFi Bandwidth for Respiration Rate Monitoring in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Respiration rate monitoring is beneficial for the diagnosis of a variety of diseases, such as heart failure and sleep disorders. Radio Frequency (RF) based respiration rate monitoring systems, namely ultra-wideband radar and COTS device, have been proposed without requiring any direct contact with the detected person. However, existing RF based systems either require expensive UWB radio (radar based) or work only in stationary environments (COTS device based). To address the limitations of both radar based and COTS device based systems, in this paper, we propose RespiRadio, a system that can detect a person’s respiration rate in dynamic ambient environments via a single TX-RX pair of WiFi cards. The key novelty of RespiRadio is that it overcomes the limit of existing COTS device based respiration rate systems by synthesizing a wider-bandwidth WiFi radio. With the synthesized WiFi radio, we can identify the path reflected by the breathing person and then analyze the periodicity of the signal power measurements only from this path to infer the respiration rate. We experimentally evaluate the performance of RespiRadio in non-static indoor environments and the results demonstrate that the overall estimation error is 0.152 breaths per minute (bpm).