Monitoring Breathing via Signal Strength in Wireless Networks

This paper shows experimentally that standard wireless networks which measure received signal strength (RSS) can be used to reliably detect human breathing and estimate the breathing rate, an application we call “BreathTaking”. We present analysis showing that, as a first order approximation, breathing induces sinusoidal variation in the measured RSS on a link, with amplitude a function of the relative amplitude and phase of the breathing-affected multipath. We show that although an individual link may not reliably detect breathing, the collective spectral content of a network of devices reliably indicates the presence and rate of breathing. We present a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of breathing rate, amplitude, and phase, which uses the RSS data from many links simultaneously. We show experimental results which demonstrate that reliable detection and frequency estimation is possible with 30 seconds of data, within 0.07 to 0.42 breaths per minute (bpm) RMS error in several experiments. The experiments also indicate that the use of directional antennas may improve the systems robustness to external motion.