Robust contactless human respiration monitoring amid moving individuals using Wi-Fi

Respiratory rate is an important vital sign that can be used to determine human physiological state. In recent years, Wi-Fi-based contactless respiration monitoring has drawn significant attention due to the prevalence of wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure. Most existing approaches to respiration monitoring perform well in controlled environments, without the presence of additional moving individuals in the area of interest. A few recent studies have attempted to reduce the impact of other people moving in the vicinity of the target individual. However, these approaches exhibit notable limitations, such as restricting the number of interfering individuals to one, or requiring a direct wired connection between the Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver for synchronization. To address these issues, in this study, we develop a contactless respiration monitoring system using commodity Wi-Fi devices, which we name RoSense. Through a series of empirical studies, we observe that the channel state information (CSI) for subcarriers is significantly affected by the presence of interfering individuals, but a small subset retain relatively clear signal patterns linked to the target’s respiration. Leveraging these findings, RoSense employs a signal power-based subcarrier selection strategy to identify high-quality subcarriers. The selected subcarriers are then aligned to enhance signal gain and fused to complement the weaker periodic parts. Additionally, RoSense periodically detects the quality of subcarriers, selecting the most effective subcarriers to maximize the contribution of high-quality ones. Extensive experiments were performed in real-world settings with 10 volunteers to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of RoSense. Our results demonstrate that RoSense is able to achieve robust respiration monitoring by suppressing the impact of interfering individuals.