research-article

Smart Homes that Monitor Breathing and Heart Rate

Authors:

Zachary Kabelac,

Robert C. MillerAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 837 - 846

https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702200

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

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.

References

[1]

Alice PDx. http://www.healthcare.philips.com/main/ homehealth/sleep/alicepdx/default.wpd. Phillips.

[2]

FMCW Transceivers. http://www.siversima.com/. SiversIMA.

[3]

iBabyGuard. http://www.ibabyguard.com/.

[4]

Kai Medical. http://www.kaimedical.com/.

[5]

Aardal, O., Paichard, Y., Brovoll, S., Berger, T., Lande, T. S., and Hamran, S.-E. Physical working principles of medical radar. Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Trans. on (2013).

[6]

Adib, F., Kabelac, Z., Katabi, D., and Miller, R. C. 3D Tracking via Body Radio Reflections. In Usenix NSDI (2014).

Digital Library

[7]

Anitori, L., de Jong, A., and Nennie, F. Fmcw radar for life-sign detection. In IEEE Radar Conference (2009).

[8]

Balakrishnan, G., Durand, F., and Guttag, J. Detecting pulse from head motions in video. In IEEE CVPR (2013).

Digital Library

[9]

Bargas-Avila, J. A., and Hornbæk, K. Old wine in new bottles or novel challenges: a critical analysis of empirical studies of user experience. In ACM CHI (2011).

Digital Library

[10]

Callahan, J., Cox, D., Hoffman, K., O'shea, D., Pollatsek, H., and Senechal, L. Calculus in context: the five college calculus project, Chapter 7 (Periodicity). WH Freeman, 1995.

[11]

Chi, Y., Jung, T.-P., and Cauwenberghs, G. Dry-contact and noncontact biopotential electrodes: Methodological review. Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Reviews in (2010).

[12]

CNET. Do wristband heart trackers actually work? A checkup. http://www.cnet.com/news/how-accurate-are-wristband-heart-ratemonitors/.

[13]

Cole, C. R., Blackstone, E. H., Pashkow, F. J., Snader, C. E., and Lauer, M. S. Heart-rate recovery immediately after exercise as a predictor of mortality. New England Journal of Medicine (1999).

[14]

de Chazal, P., O'Hare, E., Fox, N., and Heneghan, C. Assessment of sleep/wake patterns using a non-contact biomotion sensor. In IEEE EMBS (2008).

[15]

Droitcour, A. D., Boric-Lubecke, O., and Kovacs, G. T. Signal-to-noise ratio in doppler radar system for heart and respiratory rate measurements. Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Trans. (2009).

[16]

Droitcour, Amy D et. al. Range correlation and i/q performance benefits in single-chip silicon doppler radars for noncontact cardiopulmonary monitoring. Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Trans. (2004).

[17]

Fletcher, R., and Han, J. Low-cost differential front-end for doppler radar vital sign monitoring. In IEEE MTT (2009).

[18]

Garmin. Heart Rate Monitor. https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/shopby-accessories/fitness-sensors/heart-rate-monitor/prod10996.html.

[19]

GigaOm. Could a breath-monitoring headset improve your health? http://gigaom.com/2013/09/20/could-a-breath-monitoring-headsetimprove-your-health/.

[20]

Gokalp, H., and Clarke, M. Monitoring activities of daily living of the elderly and the potential for its use in telecare and telehealth: a review. TELEMEDICINE and e-HEALTH (2013).

[21]

Guard, C. Wireless Wristband Pulse Oximeter CMS-50FW With Software For Sleep Study. http://www.clinicalguard.com/wirelesswristband-pulse-oximeter-cms50fw-with-softwarefor-sleep-study-p-455.html.

[22]

Healthcare, F. M. Market for embedded health monitoring-gadgets to hit 170M devices by 2017. http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/ market-embedded-health-monitoring-gadgets-hit170m-devices-2017/2012-08-03.

[23]

Hirshfield, L. et. Al. Brain measurement for usability testing and adaptive interfaces: an example of uncovering syntactic workload with functional near infrared spectroscopy. In ACM CHI (2009).

Digital Library

[24]

Imai, K. et. Al. Vagally mediated heart rate recovery after exercise is accelerated in athletes but blunted in patients with chronic heart failure. Journal of the American College of Cardiology (1994).

[25]

InformationWeek. Health-Monitoring Devices Market Outpaces Telehealth. http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/healthmonitoring-devices-market-outpacestelehealth/d/d-id/1104636.

[26]

Jia, Y. et. Al. Through-wall-radar localization for stationary human based on life-sign detection. In IEEE RADAR (2013).

[27]

Kaltiokallio, O. et. Al. Non-invasive respiration rate monitoring using a single cots tx-rx pair. In ACM/IEEE IPSN (2014).

Digital Library

[28]

Lanata, A et. Al. Comparative evaluation of susceptibility to motion artifact in different wearable systems for monitoring respiratory rate.

[29]

Lin, J. et. Al. Microwave apexcardiography. Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Trans. (1979).

[30]

Mahlke, S., and Thüring, M. Studying antecedents of emotional experiences in interactive contexts. In ACM CHI (2007).

Digital Library

[31]

Mayo Clinic. What's a normal resting heart rate? http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/expert-answers/heartrate/faq-20057979.

[32]

Min, J. et. Al. Toss nturn: Smartphone as sleep and sleep quality detector. In ACM CHI (2014).

Digital Library

[33]

Oppenheim, A., Schafer, R., Buck, J., et al. Discrete-time signal processing. Prentice Hall, 1989.

Digital Library

[34]

Patwari, N. et. Al. Breathfinding: A wireless network that monitors and locates breathing in a home. Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of (2014).

[35]

Petterson, M. et. Al. The effect of motion on pulse oximetry and its clinical significance. Anesthesia & Analgesia (2007).

[36]

Pinheiro, E., Postolache, O., and Girão, P. Theory and developments in an unobtrusive cardiovascular system representation: ballistocardiography. The open biomedical engineering journal (2010).

[37]

Steele, R., Lo, A., Secombe, C., and Wong, Y. K. Elderly persons perception and acceptance of using wireless sensor networks to assist healthcare. International journal of medical informatics (2009).

[38]

Tan, C. et. Al. Combining think-aloud and physiological data to understand video game experiences. In ACM CHI (2014).

Digital Library

[39]

Tse, D., and Vishwanath, P. Fundamentals of Wireless Communications. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Digital Library

[40]

U.S. National Library of Medicine MedLine Plus. Heart-respiratory monitor - infantsShare. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ medlineplus/ency/article/007236.htm.

[41]

U.S. National Library of Medicine MedLine Plus. Rapid Shallow Breathing. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/ article/007198.htm.

[42]

Venkatesh, S., Anderson, C., Rivera, N., and Buehrer, R. Implementation and analysis of respiration-rate estimation using impulse-based uwb. In IEEE MILCOMM (2005).

[43]

Vivonoetics. Respiration: Single or Dual-Band. http://vivonoetics.com/products/vivosense/ analyzing/respiration-single-or-dual-band/.

[44]

Wu, H.-Y., Rubinstein, M., Shih, E., Guttag, J., Durand, F., and Freeman, W. Eulerian video magnification for revealing subtle changes in the world. ACM SIGGRAPH (2012).

Digital Library

[45]

Xu, Y., Wu, S., Chen, C., Chen, J., and Fang, G. A novel method for automatic detection of trapped victims by ultrawideband radar. Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Trans. on (2012).

[46]

Yang, R. et. Al. Making sustainability sustainable: Challenges in the design of eco-interaction technologies. In ACM CHI (2014).

Digital Library

[47]

Yarovoy, A. et. Al. Uwb radar for human being detection. Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, IEEE (2006).

[48]

Zaffaroni, A., de Chazal, P., Heneghan, C., Boyle, P., Mppm, P. R., and McNicholas, W. T. Sleepminder: an innovative contact-free device for the estimation of the apnoea-hypopnoea index. In IEEE EMBS (2009).

Cited By

Visconti PRausa GDel-Valle-Soto CVelázquez RCafagna DDe Fazio R(2025)Innovative Driver Monitoring Systems and On-Board-Vehicle Devices in a Smart-Road Scenario Based on the Internet of Vehicle Paradigm: A Literature and Commercial Solutions OverviewSensors10.3390/s2502056225:2(562)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.3390/s25020562
Hari AKumar RKumbhani BDarshi SAgarwal SSahambi JJain SChawla D(2025)Contactless Breathing Monitoring at Home and in the Hospital: Protocol for a Low-Cost Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radar-Based DeviceJMIR Research Protocols10.2196/5953214(e59532)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.2196/59532
Pushparaj Kumar ASaini G(2025)Comparative Study of Vital Sign Monitoring Techniques and Methods using Radar SensorRecent Advances in Electrical & Electronic Engineering (Formerly Recent Patents on Electrical & Electronic Engineering)10.2174/012352096525784723110807561818:1(64-81)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.2174/0123520965257847231108075618
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Smart Homes that Monitor Breathing and Heart Rate
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

Recommendations

Contactless seismocardiography via deep learning radars
MobiCom '20: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

The seismocardiogram (SCG) is a recording of a human heart's mechanical activity. It captures fine-grained cardiovascular events such as the opening and closing of heart valves and the contraction and relaxation of heart chambers. Today, SCG recordings ...
Demo: real-time breath monitoring using wireless signals
MobiCom '14: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking

This demo presents Vital-Radio, a wireless sensing technology that monitors breathing remotely, without requiring any body contact. Vital-Radio operates by transmitting a low-power wireless signal and monitoring its reflections off the human body. It ...
Monitoring a Person's Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate on a Shared Bed Using Geophones
SenSys '17: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems

Using geophones to sense bed vibrations caused by ballistic force has shown great potential in monitoring a person's heart rate during sleep. It does not require a special mattress or sheets, and the user is free to move around and change position ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2015

4290 pages

ISBN:9781450331456

DOI:10.1145/2702123

General Chairs:
Bo Begole
Huawei, USA
,
Jinwoo Kim
Yonsei University, Korea
,
Program Chairs:
Kori Inkpen
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Woontack Woo
KAIST, Korea

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 April 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '15

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 18 - 23, 2015

Seoul, Republic of Korea

Acceptance Rates

CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

685
Total Citations
View Citations
6,369
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)583
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)46

Reflects downloads up to 25 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Visconti PRausa GDel-Valle-Soto CVelázquez RCafagna DDe Fazio R(2025)Innovative Driver Monitoring Systems and On-Board-Vehicle Devices in a Smart-Road Scenario Based on the Internet of Vehicle Paradigm: A Literature and Commercial Solutions OverviewSensors10.3390/s2502056225:2(562)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.3390/s25020562
Hari AKumar RKumbhani BDarshi SAgarwal SSahambi JJain SChawla D(2025)Contactless Breathing Monitoring at Home and in the Hospital: Protocol for a Low-Cost Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radar-Based DeviceJMIR Research Protocols10.2196/5953214(e59532)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.2196/59532
Pushparaj Kumar ASaini G(2025)Comparative Study of Vital Sign Monitoring Techniques and Methods using Radar SensorRecent Advances in Electrical & Electronic Engineering (Formerly Recent Patents on Electrical & Electronic Engineering)10.2174/012352096525784723110807561818:1(64-81)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.2174/0123520965257847231108075618
Li WXu ZChu LShi QBraun RShi J(2025)FMCW Radar-Based Drowsiness Detection With a Convolutional Adaptive Pooling Attention Gated-Recurrent-Unit NetworkIEEE Transactions on Radar Systems10.1109/TRS.2024.35164133(71-87)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TRS.2024.3516413
Radomski AArai MOshima KOneda NUeno ATeichmann D(2025)Reflective PPG Sensor Measures Heart Rate Through Clothing During DrivingIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.351479725:3(4157-4166)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2024.3514797
Tsanas A(2025)Accurately Inferring Physical Activity Levels and Sleep From Wrist-Worn Actigraphy Recordings With Sample Rates as Low as 10 HzIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2025.353927813(27257-27267)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3539278
Gharamohammadi ABagheri MAbu-Sardanah SRiad MAbedi HAnsariyan AWang KSaragadam AChumachenko DAbhari SMorita PKhajepour AShaker G(2025)Smart furniture using radar technology for cardiac health monitoringScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-80062-515:1Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-80062-5
Xu MHan YZhu NYang B(2025)A method for recognizing individual dynamic thermal adaptations using wireless signalsEnergy and Buildings10.1016/j.enbuild.2025.115448333(115448)Online publication date: Apr-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2025.115448
Yi EWu DXiong JZhang FNiu KLi WZhang DVanbever LZhang I(2024)BFMSenseProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691918(1697-1712)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691918
Sharma AAnand NMukherjee SKumar SKumar SMohapatra H(2024)Analyzing Territorial Variations in the Implementation of IoT-Based Smart HomesUtilizing Technology to Manage Territories10.4018/979-8-3693-6854-1.ch010(305-334)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-6854-1.ch010
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten