On Goodness of WiFi based Monitoring of Vital Signs in the Wild

Abstract: WiFi channel state information (CSI) has emerged as a plausible modality for sensing different human vital signs, i.e. respiration and body motion, as a function of modulated wireless signals that travel between WiFi devices. Although a remarkable proposition, most of the existing research in this space struggles to withstand robust performance beyond experimental conditions. To this end, we take a careful look at the dynamics of WiFi signals under human respiration and body motions in the wild. We first characterize the WiFi signal components - multipath and signal subspace - that are modulated by human respiration and body motions. We extrapolate on a set of transformations, including first-order differentiation, max-min normalization and component projections, that faithfully explains and quantifies the dynamics of respiration and body motions on WiFi signals. Grounded in this characterization, we propose two methods: 1) a respiration tracking technique that models the peak dynamics observed in the time-varying signal subspaces and 2) a body-motion tracking technique built with a multi-dimensional clustering of evolving signal subspaces. Finally, we reflect on the manifestation of these techniques in a practical sleep monitoring application. Our systematic evaluation with over 550 hours of data from 5 users covering both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) settings shows that the proposed techniques can achieve comparable performance to purpose-built pulse-Doppler radar.