UbiBreathe: A Ubiquitous non-Invasive WiFi-based Breathing Estimator

Monitoring breathing rates and patterns helps in the diagnosis and potential avoidance of various health problems. Current solutions for respiratory monitoring, however, are usually invasive and/or limited to medical facilities. In this paper, we propose a novel respiratory monitoring system, UbiBreathe, based on ubiquitous off-the-shelf WiFi-enabled devices. Our experiments show that the received signal strength (RSS) at a WiFi-enabled device held on a person’s chest is affected by the breathing process. This effect extends to scenarios when the person is situated on the line-of-sight (LOS) between the access point and the device, even without holding it. UbiBreathe leverages these changes in the WiFi RSS patterns to enable ubiquitous non-invasive respiratory rate estimation, as well as apnea detection. We propose the full architecture and design for UbiBreathe, incorporating various modules that help reliably extract the hidden breathing signal from a noisy WiFi RSS. The system ha...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Heba Abdelnasser, Khaled A. Harras, Moustafa Youssef
• Keywords: Computer Networks, MOBIHOC 2015