Robust Respiration Sensing with WiFi

The past decade has witnessed emerging applications of breath monitoring using off-the-shelf WiFi devices owing to their low-cost, non-intrusive, and privacy-friendly characteristics. While existing works have achieved promising results in certain scenarios, the performance degradation introduced by the interfering person who moves around the target user has not been fully investigated, which hinders practical applications of WiFi-based breath sensing. In this paper, we propose a robust respiration sensing system with WiFi which could achieve accurate respiration sensing under strong interference. To achieve this, we first design a 2-D Capon beamformer to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Then, the interfering user’s trajectory is estimated through spatial-temporal processing. Finally, we design a respiration extracting algorithm based on the constraint of the interferer’s trajectory and breath energy to find the optimal position to extract breath signals. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed framework can reduce the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of breath rate estimation by up to 48% compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates the superior robustness and effectiveness of our system.