Can We Monitor Breathing During Sleep via Wi-Fi on Smartphone?

Over the last decade there has been high interest in home sleep monitoring among research community and society. Smartphone-based sleep monitoring seems to be especially attractive. However, smartphone should be able to register physiological processes for that, such as breathing or heartbeats. In this study, we tried to detect breathing based on the analysis of channel state information (CSI) of Wi-Fi connection between a smartphone and an access point. We collected data of 5 subjects with different body mass index (17-33) in base sleep postures: prone, supine, and side. The obtained CSI-based respiratory signal was compared with ground truth from a contact belt sensor. The mean correlation coefficient between the signals of 0.85 was achieved. The mean absolute difference between respiratory rates (breaths per epoch) is 0.39. The results show that it is possible to use smartphones without additional sensors for registering breathing based on CSI and potentially for sleep monitoring.