Accurate Respiration Monitoring for Mobile Users With Commercial RFID Devices

Vital signs (e.g., respiration rate or heartbeat rate) sensing is of great importance to implement pervasive in-home healthcare. Traditional vital signs monitoring approaches usually require users to wear some dedicated sensors. These approaches are intrusive and inconvenient to use, especially for elderly people. Some non-intrusive vital signs monitoring approaches based on wireless sensing have been proposed in recent years. However, these approaches require the target user to be in situ during the monitoring process, which greatly limits their utilization in practical scenarios where the target users usually move around. In this paper, we propose RF-RMM, an RFID-based approach to accurate and continuous respiration monitoring for mobile users. The major challenge in respiration monitoring for moving people is that the tiny body displacement caused by the user’s respiration is overwhelmed by the user’s entire body movement. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that uses a pair of tags to eliminate the effect of the user’s body movement. We fuse the data from the paired tags to cancel the effect of the user’s entire body movement and retain only the displacement caused by the user’s respiration. Another challenging issue in implementing RF-RMM is how to resolve the phase ambiguity problem when the target user moves around, which becomes more serious than in the static case. We propose a distance tracking algorithm to track the phase transition during the user’s movement, according to which the phase ambiguity problem can be well handled. We implement RF-RMM on commercial RFID devices and conduct extensive real-world experiments to evaluate its performance. The results show that RF-RMM achieves accurate respiration rate monitoring with an average error of 0.54 BPM in estimating different users’ respiration rate and an average relative error of less than 13% in estimating the user’s individual breath length.