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ABSTRACT

Sleep not only affects the productivity or physical vitality of a person, but also is related
to many diseases including diabetes, obesity and depression. Some sleep disorders such as the
sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), can even cause stroke and heart failure. On the other hand,
although about one third of adults have suffered from poor sleep quality, most of them may not be
able to evaluate their own sleep very well. Therefore, a system which is able to provide
quantitative sleep information is highly desirable.
To date, there are a large number of sleep monitoring systems, ranging from clinic
standard Polysomnography (PSG), to numerous commercial products. In most of these systems,
people usually need to wear some devices (e.g. wristbands, headband, and probes), to collect data
that are used directly or indirectly to infer the sleep quality. These systems are more or less
obtrusive to the users. In addition, many systems only provide coarse-grained sleep quality
information (e.g. total sleep time). Sometimes, even this information can be biased since it is
inferred from in-direct measurements (e.g. accelerations). The obtrusiveness to users, the coarse
granularity, and the accuracy of results are among the major problems in many existing sleep
monitoring systems.
Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted numerous research
interests in recent years. With off-the-shelf WiFi devices, fine-grained respiration information of a
person under different sleeping positions can be extracted by introducing a breath monitoring
system based on WiFi signals using Channel State Information (CSI).
Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted numerous research
interests in recent years. Previous work mainly focused on detecting the presence of a person or
identifying human gestures and activities. In this paper, we show that with off-the-shelf WiFi
devices, fine-grained respiration information of a person under different sleeping positions can be
extracted successfully. We do this by introducing a breath monitoring system based on WiFi
signals. This system adopts off-the-shelf WiFi devices to continuously collect the fine-grained
wireless channel state information (CSI) around a person. From the CSI, the rhythmic patterns
associated with respiration and abrupt changes due to the body movement are identified.
Compared to existing respiration monitoring systems that usually require special devices attached
to human body, this system is completely contactless. In addition, different from many vision-
based sleep monitoring systems, it is robust to low-light environments and does not raise privacy
concerns. Preliminary testing results show that our system can reliably track a persons
respiration reliably in different sleeping postures.
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