LAUSR

Respiration rate is an essential vital indicator for health monitoring. While traditional sensor-based methods support acceptable sensing performance, the recent advance in wireless sensing could enable sensor-free and contact-free respiration sensing, which is particularly important during the practice of social distancing against a pandemic like COVID-19. Among a variety of wireless technologies employed for respiration sensing, Wi-Fi-based solutions are most popular due to the pervasive development of infrastructure. However, the existing Wi-Fi-based approaches need to retrieve Wi-Fi readings from access points, which are not often accessible for the end users. In this article, we propose a novel system, MoBreath, in which we utilize the Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) readings extracted from the end-user device, a smartphone, to monitor the respiration rate for the first time. We introduce and address unique technical challenges, such as selecting the optimum CSI subcarriers from many noisy candidates and providing smartphone placement strategies for both single and multiple human target scenarios based on the Fresnel zone model to support highly accurate respiration sensing. Our evaluation of MoBreath using commodity smartphones in different environments shows that it can accurately estimate the respiration rate at a low error rate of 0.34 breaths per minute and support the sensing range of up to 3–4 m. Even for challenging scenarios such as the target is covered by a quilt and multiple targets are in the sensing area, MoBreath can still support highly accurate results.