RUBreathing: non-contact real time respiratory rate monitoring system

The respiration rate of a person provides critical information about their well-being. Conventionally, contact sensing is used for breathing monitoring; however, it is expensive, uncomfortable, and immobile. In-home non-contact breathing monitoring is now possible via Doppler radar and motion capture video sensors, yet these technologies are limited in mobility, among other limitations. When monitoring a patient who is free to move around his or her home, it is dificult to scale current non-contact sensors to cover the large area. Our RUBreathing sensor system uses RF received signal strength (RSS) in a network to estimate breathing rate in real-time with high accuracy over a wide area. In this demonstration, we show the sensor continuously estimating a patient's respiration rate from non-contact RSS measurements between wireless devices.