1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 SIGNAL
A signal [1] can be defined as a physical quantity that varies with time,
temperature, pressure or with any independent variables such as speech signal or
video signal. Any unwanted signal interfering with the main signal is termed as
noise. So, noise is also a signal but unwanted.

1.2 SIGNAL PROCESSING

Signal processing [2] is an area of systems engineering, electrical
engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of
signals, or measurements of time varying or spatially varying physical quantities.
The process of operation in which the characteristics of a signal (Amplitude,
shape, phase, frequency, etc.) undergoes a change is known as signal processing.
A signal carries information, and objective of signal processing is to extract
useful information carried by the signal. The method of information extraction
depends on the type of signal and the nature of the information being carried by
the signal.
Signals of interest can include sound, electromagnetic radiation, images,
and sensor data.
Some examples are biological data such as electrocardiograms, control
system signals, telecommunication transmission signals, and many others.
The goals of signal processing can roughly be divided into the following
categories.

Signal

acquisition

and

reconstruction,

which

involves

measuring a physical signal, storing it, and possibly later

rebuilding the original signal or an approximation thereof.
Quality improvement, such as noise reduction, image
enhancement, and echo cancellation.
Signal compression, including audio compression, image
compression, and video compression.
Feature extraction, such as image understanding and speech
recognition.

1.2.2 BLOCK DIAGRAM

1.2.3 CATEGORIES
There are four categories that fall under the roof of signal processing

Analog signal processing

Discrete signal processing
Digital signal Processing
Non Linear signal processing

1.2.3.1 Analog Signal Processing

Analog signal processing is for signals that have not been digitized, as in
legacy radio, telephone, radar, and television systems.
This involves linear electronic circuits as well as non-linear ones. The
linear ones are, for instance, passive filters, active filters, additive mixers,
integrators and delay lines.
Non-linear circuits include compandors, multiplicators (frequency mixers
and voltage controlled amplifiers), voltage-controlled filters, voltagecontrolled oscillators and phase-locked loops.

1.2.3.2 Discrete Signal Processing

Discrete-time signal processing is for sampled signals, defined only at
discrete points in time, and as such are quantized in time, but not in
magnitude.
Analog discrete-time signal processing is a technology based on electronic
devices such as sample and hold circuits, analog time-division multiplexers,
analog delay lines and analog feedback shift registers.
This technology was a predecessor of digital signal processing and is still
used in advanced processing of gigahertz signals.
The concept of discrete-time signal processing also refers to a theoretical
discipline that establishes a mathematical basis for digital signal processing,
without taking quantization error into consideration.

1.2.3.3 Digital Signal Processing

Digital signal processing is the processing of digitized discrete-time
sampled signals. Processing is done by general-purpose computers or by

digital circuits such as ASICs, field-programmable gate arrays or

specialized digital signal processors (DSP chips).
Typical arithmetical operations include fixed-point and floating-point, realvalued and complex-valued, multiplication and addition. Other typical
operations supported by the hardware are circular buffers and look-up
tables.
Examples of algorithms are the Fast Fourier transforms (FFT), finite
impulse response (FIR) filter, Infinite impulse response (IIR) filter, and
adaptive filters such as the Wiener and Kalman filters.

1.2.3.4 Non Linear Signal Processing

Nonlinear signal processing involves the analysis and processing of signals
produced from nonlinear systems and can be in the time, frequency, or
Spatio-temporal domains.
Nonlinear systems can produce highly complex behaviors including
bifurcations, chaos, harmonics, and sub harmonics which cannot be
produced or analyzed using linear methods.

1.2.4 APPLICATION
Signal compression, including image compression, and video compression.
Feature extraction, such as image understanding and speech recognition.

1.2.5 ADVANTAGES
Data collected at some location.
Once all of data is collected, it then has to be processed in order to have
usable information.

Quite frequently, data is collected and processed in two separate locations.

1.3 WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Wireless sensor networks [2] are composed of hundreds of thousands of
tiny devices called nodes. A sensor node is often abbreviated as a node. A Sensor
is a device which senses the information and passes the same on to a mote.
Sensors are used to measure the changes to physical environment like pressure,
humidity, sound, vibration and changes to the health of person like blood pressure,
stress and heartbeat.
Wireless network refers to any type of computer network that uses wireless
infrastructure (usually, but not always radio waves) for network connections. It
needs network components such as Wi-Fi adapter, wireless router / modem, etc.,

Fig 1. Overview of Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed
autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such
as temperature, sound, pressure, etc.

The WSN is built of "nodes" from a few to several hundreds or even

thousands, where each node is connected to one (or sometimes several)
sensors.
Each such sensor network node has typically several parts: a radio
transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to an external antenna, a
microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing with the sensors and an
energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy harvesting.
The topology of the WSNs can vary from a simple star network to an
advanced multi-hop wireless mesh network.

1.3.2 THE ARCHITECTURE OF WSN

Fig 2. Wireless sensor network architecture

In a typical WSN the following network components [3],

a) Sensor nodes (Field devices): Each sensor network node has typically
several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to
an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing
with the sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded
form of energy harvesting.
b) Gateway or Access points: A Gateway enables communication between
Host application and field devices.
c) Network manager: A Network Manager is responsible for configuration
of the

network, scheduling communication between devices (i.e.,

configuring super frames), management of the routing tables and

monitoring and reporting the health of the network.
d) Security manager: The Security Manager is responsible for the
generation, storage, and management of keys.
The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with
much more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a
gateway between sensor nodes and the end user as they typically forward data
from the WSN on to a server. Other special components in routing based networks
are routers, designed to compute, calculate and distribute the routing tables. Many
techniques are used to connect to the outside world including mobile phone
networks, satellite phones, radio modems, high power Wi-Fi links etc.

1.3.3 ADVANTAGES

It avoids a lot of wiring.

It can accommodate new devices at any time.
It's flexible to go through physical partitions.
It can be accessed through a centralized monitor.

1.3.4 REAL-TIME EXAMPLES

Area monitoring
Environmental/Earth monitoring
Air quality monitoring
Air pollution monitoring
Forest fire detection
Land slide detection
Water quality monitoring
Natural disaster prevention
Machine health monitoring
Agriculture

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS FOR RESPIRATION MONITORING:

It is well recognized that sleep not only affects the productivity or physical
vitality of a person, but also is related to many diseases including diabetes, obesity
and depression[4]. Some sleep disorders such as the sleep apnea syndrome
(OSAS), can even cause stroke and heart failure. On the other hand, although
about one third of adults have suffered from poor sleep quality, most of them may
not be able to evaluate their own sleep very well [5]. Therefore, a system which is
able to provide quantitative sleep information is highly desirable.
Contactless Respiration Monitoring System, the first sleep monitoring
system based on WiFi signals. It adopts off-the-shelf WiFi devices to continuously
collect the fine-grained wireless channel state information (CSI) around a person.
From the CSI, it extracts rhythmic patterns associated with respiration and abrupt
changes due to the body movement. Compared to existing sleep monitoring
systems that usually require special devices attached to human body (i.e. probes,
head belt, and wrist band), this system is completely contactless. In addition,
different from many vision-based sleep monitoring systems, it is robust to low-

light environments and does not raise privacy concerns. It can reliably track a
persons respiration and sleeping postures and rollovers in different conditions.

CHAPTER 2
ISSUES AND CHALLENGES OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

2.1 INTRODUCTION

10

Sensors can be perceived to be a connecting link between the physical and

the digital worlds. Sensors gather data from the real world which could be about a
physical object or could be on the occurrence of a certain event and transform
them into digital signals which can be further processed, stored and further
transmitted to a computing system.
A sensor network [28] is a group of specialized transducers, which are
essentially sensor nodes, with a communications infrastructure intended to monitor
and record conditions at diverse locations.
The development of wireless sensor networks was motivated by military
applications such as battlefield surveillance while in todays world, sensors are
being predominantly used to monitor parameters like temperature, humidity,
pressure, light intensity, wind direction etc. Potential applications of sensor
networks include [28]:

Industrial automation
Video surveillance
Traffic monitoring
Medical device monitoring
Monitoring of weather conditions
Air traffic control
Robot control.

The sensor node is essentially a transducer that converts the energy in the
physical world into electrical energy. [29]The resulting electrical signals in order
to be processed are passed through a signal conditioning stage where they could be
amplified or attenuated. Further the signals are passed through filters to reduce
unwanted noise signals whose frequencies lie above or below the required range.
The signal obtained which is still in the analog form needs to be converted to
digital signals using the analog-to-digital converter. The resulting digital signal is
ready for further processing, storing, or visualization.

11

Numerous issues and challenges have been faced and several researches
have been carried out to study the functioning of sensor networks and the various
issues faced while setting up a sensor network.
2.2 Issues in WSN
The major issues [7] that affect the design and performance of a wireless
sensor network are as follows:
1) Hardware
2) Wireless Radio Communication Characteristics
3) Medium Access Schemes
4) Deployment
5) Localization
6) Synchronization
7) Calibration
8) Network Layer
9) Transport Layer
10) Data Aggregation and Data Dissemination
11) Database Centric and Querying
12) Architecture
13) Programming Models for Sensor Networks
14) Middleware
15) Quality of Service
16) Security

HARDWARE
The hardware design issues of sensor nodes are quite different from other
applications and they are [8]:

12

1) Radio Range of nodes should be high (1-5 kilometers). Radio range is critical
for ensuring network connectivity and data collection in a network as the
environment being monitored may not have an installed infrastructure for
communication. In many networks the nodes may not establish connection for
many days or may go out of range after establishing connection.
2) Use of Memory Chips like flash memory is recommended for sensor networks
as they are non-volatile, inexpensive and volatile.
3) Energy/Power Consumption of the sensing device should be minimized and
sensor nodes should be energy efficient since their limited energy resource
determines their lifetime. To conserve power the node should shut off the radio
power supply when not in use. Battery type is important since it can affect the
design of sensor nodes.
Battery Protection Circuit to avoid overcharge or discharge problem can be added
to the sensor nodes.
4) Sensor Networks consists of hundreds of thousands of nodes. It is preferred
only if the node is cheap.
WIRELESS RADIO COMMUNICATION CHARACTERISTICS
Performance of WSN depends on quality of wireless communication. But
wireless communication in sensor networks is known for its unpredictable nature.
Main design issues for communication in WSNs are:
1) Low power consumption in sensor networks is needed to enable long operating
lifetime by facilitating low duty cycle operation, local signal processing.
2) Distributed Sensing effectively acts against various environmental obstacles and
care should be taken that the signal strength, consequently the effective radio
range is not reduced by various factors like reflection, scattering and dispersions.
3) Multi-hop networking may be adapted among sensor nodes to reduce
communication link range and also density of sensor nodes should be high.

13

4) Long range communication is typically point to point and requires high

transmission power, with the danger of being eavesdropped. So we should
consider short range transmission to minimize the possibility of being
eavesdropped.
5) Communication systems should include error control subsystems to detect
errors and to correct them.
DEPLOYMENT
Deployment means setting up an operational sensor network in a real world
environment [9]. Deployment of sensor network is a labor intensive and
cumbersome activity as we do not have influence over the quality of wireless
communication and also the real world puts strains on sensor nodes by interfering
during communications. Sensor nodes can be deployed either by placing one after
another in a sensor field or by dropping it from a plane. Various deployment issues
which need to be taken care are [10, 11]:
1) When sensor nodes are deployed in real world, Node death due to energy
depletion either caused by normal battery discharge or due to short circuits is a
common problem which may lead to wrong sensor readings. Also sink nodes acts
as gateways and they store and forward the data collected. Hence, problems
affecting sink nodes should be detected to minimize data loss.
2) Deployment of sensor networks results in network congestion due to many
concurrent transmission attempts made by several sensor nodes. Concurrent
transmission attempts occur due to inappropriate design of the MAC layer or by
repeated network floods. Another issue is the physical length of a link. Two nodes
may be very close to each other but still they may not be able to communicate due
to physical interference in the real world while nodes which are far away may
communicate with each other.

14

3) Low data yield is another common problem in real world deployment of sensor
nodes. Low data yield means a network delivers insufficient amount of
information.
4) Self Configuration of sensor networks without human intervention is needed
due to random deployment of sensor nodes.
A framework is proposed in [11] considering the above deployment issues.
POWER is a software environment for planning and deploying wireless sensor
network applications into actual environment.
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture can be considered as a set of rules and regulation for
implementing some functionalities along with a set of interfaces, functional
components, protocols and physical hardware. Software architecture is needed to
bridge the gap between raw hardware capabilities and a complete system.
The key issues that must be addressed by the sensor architecture are [16, 17, 18]:
1) Several operations like continuous monitoring of the channel, encoding of data
and transferring of bits to the radio need to be performed in parallel. Also sensor
events and data calculations must continue to proceed while communication is in
progress.
2) A durable and scalable architecture would allow dynamic changes to be made
for the topology with minimum update messages being transmitted.
3) The system must be flexible to meet the wide range of target application
scenarios since the wireless sensor networks to not have a fixed set of
communication protocols that they must adhere to.
4) The architecture must provide precise control over radio transmission timing.
This requirement is driven by the need for ultra-low power communication for
data collection application scenarios.

15

5) The architecture must decouple the data path speed and the radio transmission
rate because direct coupling between processing speed and communication bit
rates can lead to sub-optimal energy performance.
DATABASE CENTRIC AND QUERYING
Wireless sensor networks have the potential to span and monitor a large
geographical area producing massive amount of data. So sensor networks should
be able to accept the queries for data and respond with the results.
The data flow in a sensor database is very different from the data flow of the
traditional database due to the following design issues and requirements of a
sensor network [12, 13, 14, 15]:
1) The nodes are volatile since the nodes may get depleted and links between
various nodes may go down at any point of time but data collection should be
interrupted as little as possible.
2) Sensor data is exposed more errors than in a traditional database due to
interference of signals and device noise.
3) Sensor networks produce data continuously in real time and on a large scale
from the sensed phenomenon resulting in need of updating the data frequently;
whereas a traditional database is mostly of static and centralized in nature.
4) Limited storage and scarce of energy is another important constraint that needs
to be taken care of in a sensor network database but a traditional database usually
consists of plenty of resources and disk space is not an issue.
5) The low level communication primitives in the sensor networks are designed in
terms of named data rather than the node identifiers which are used in the
traditional networks.
CALIBRATION
Calibration is the process of adjusting the raw sensor readings obtained
from the sensors into corrected values by comparing it with some standard values.

16

Manual calibration of sensors in a sensor network is a time consuming and

difficult task due to failure of sensor nodes and random noise which makes manual
calibration of sensors too expensive.
Various Calibration issues in sensor networks are [19,20,21]:
1) A sensor network consists of large number of sensors typically with no
calibration interface.
2) Access to individual sensors in the field can be limited.
3) Reference values might not be readily available.
4) Different applications require different calibration.
5) Requires calibration in a complex dynamic environment with many observables
like aging, decaying, damage etc.
6) Other objectives of calibration include accuracy, resiliency against random
errors, ability to be applied in various scenarios and to address a variety of error
models.
Research includes designing various calibration techniques involving the
various issues which we have discussed previously.
LOCALIZATION
Sensor localization is a fundamental and crucial issue for network
management and operation. In many of the real world scenarios, the sensors are
deployed without knowing their positions in advance and also there is no
supporting infrastructure available to locate and manage them once they are
deployed [22, 24, 25].
Determining the physical location of the sensors after they have been deployed is
known as the problem of localization. Location discovery or localization algorithm
for a sensor network should satisfy the following requirements [23]:
1) The localization algorithm should be distributed since a centralized approach
requires high computation at selective nodes to estimate the position of nodes in

17

the whole environment. This increases signaling bandwidth and also puts extra
load on nodes close to center node.
2) Knowledge of the node location can be used to implement energy efficient
message routing protocols in sensor networks.
3) Localization algorithms should be robust enough to localize the failures and
loss of nodes. It should be tolerant to error in physical measurements.
4) It is shown in [26] that the precision of the localization increases with the
number of beacons. A beacon is a node which is aware of its location. But the
main problem with increased beacons is that they are more expensive than other
sensor nodes and once the unknown stationary nodes have been localized using
beacon nodes then the beacons become useless.
5) Techniques that depend on measuring the ranging information from signal
strength and time of arrival require specialized hardware that is typically not
available on sensor nodes.
6) Localization algorithm should be accurate, scalable and support mobility of
nodes.
2.3 Challenges in WSN
Wireless sensor networks pose certain design challenges [27] due to the
following reasons,
1) The sensor nodes are randomly deployed and hence do not fit into any regular
topology. Once deployed, they usually do not require human intervention. This
implies that setup and maintenance need to be autonomous.
2) Sensor networks are infrastructure-less. Therefore, all routing and maintenance
algorithms need to be distributed.
3) An important bottleneck in the operation of sensor nodes is the available energy.
Sensors usually rely on their battery for power, which in many cases should be

18

considered as a major constraint while designing protocols. The wireless sensor

node, being a micro-electronic device, can only be equipped with a limited power
source. In most application scenarios, replenishment of power resources might
become impossible. The sensor node lifetime, therefore, shows a strong
dependence on battery lifetime.
4) Hardware design for sensor nodes should also consider energy efficiency as a
primary requirement. The micro-controller, operating system, and application
software should be designed to conserve power.
5) Sensor nodes should be able to synchronize with each other in a completely
distributed manner, so that TDMA schedules can be imposed and temporal
ordering of detected events can be performed without ambiguity.
6) A sensor network should also be capable of adapting to changing connectivity
due to the failure of nodes, or new nodes powering up. The routing protocols
should also be able to dynamically include or avoid sensor nodes in their paths.
7) Real-time communication over sensor networks must be supported through
provision of guarantees on maximum delay, minimum bandwidth, or other QoS
parameters.

19

CHAPTER 3
LITERATURE SURVEY

3.1.1 T. Hao, G. Xing, and G. Zhou, isleep: unobtrusive sleep quality

monitoring using smartphones, in The 11th ACM Sensys, p. 4, 2013.
The quality of sleep is an important factor in maintaining a healthy life
style. iSleep uses the built-in microphone of the smart-phone to detect the events
that are closely related to sleep quality, including body movement, couch and
snore. It adopts a lightweight decision-tree-based algorithm to classify various
events based on carefully selected acoustic features. The model of the features
such as root mean square (rms), and variance will be extracted from the frames
that potentially contain events of interest. Based on the detected events, iSleep
infers quantitative measures of sleep quality based on Actigraphy and Pittsburgh
Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). iSleep is very easy to use and truly unobtrusive: the
user just needs to start iSleep app and place the phone somewhere close to the bed.

3.1.2 Ching-Wei Wang, Andrew Hunter, Neil Gravill, and Simon

Matusiewicz Unconstrained Video Monitoring of Breathing Behavior, IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 61, NO. 2,
FEBRUARY 2014
It is based on camera-vision. This paper presents a new real-time automated
infrared video monitoring technique for detection of breathing anomalies. The
Persistent Luminous Impression Model (PLIM) is designed to accumulate errors to
enhance the breathing signals and to differentiate between the breathing activity
and the body movement. A simple measure of activity level can be extracted from
the PLIM, and used to identify motion events. It uses a two-state algorithm, which
switches between the normal breathing state and the motion event state. One

20

limitation of the presented method is the number of heuristically determined

parameters of the algorithm.

3.1.3 Ming-Chun Huang, Wenyao Xu, Jason Liu, Lauren Samy, Amir Vajid,
Nabil Alshurafa, and Majid Sarr afzadeh,Inconspicuous on-Bed Respiratory
Rate Monitoring, in ACM, 2013
Respiratory rate is an important indicator of a persons overall health. It is
important for many clinical uses and is often monitoring during clinical
evaluations as one of the four standard vital signs along with temperature, heart
rate and blood pressure.
E-textile bedsheet works as a transducer which converts pressure human
body to the bedsheet into voltage. Via analyzing the voltage matrix (pressure
matrix), human body locations can be identified. When a subject sleeps on top of
the bedsheet, its chest area should be detected. Based on analyzing the features
(sum of pressure, standard deviation, and singular values), respiratory signals can
be extracted.

3.1.4 Ruth, S. Elliot, C. Ke-Yu, G. Mayank, G. Sidhant, and S. N.

Pate,Wibreathe: Estimating respiration rate using wireless signals in natural
settings in the home, in IEEE International Conference on Pervasive
Computing and Communications (PERCOM), 2015.
WiBreathe, a wireless, high fidelity and non-invasive breathing monitor
that leverages wireless signals at 2.4 GHz to estimate an individuals respiration
rate. It can detect a persons respiration rate from anywhere in a house without any
instrumentation on the body. The system only requires a pair of transmitter and
receivers that can be placed anywhere in the house.

21

Breathing alters the magnitude of reflected signal inducing an amplitude

modulation on the transmitted wireless signal. The adaptive algorithm takes the
results adaptively from five different sub-algorithms, making the system robust in
a dynamically changing environment. This approach combines the estimates from
an ensemble of those different techniques and adapts dynamically over a different
scenarios to enable continuous respiration rate monitoring over long periods of
time.

3.1.5 F. Adib, H. Mao, Z. Kabelac, D. Katabi, and R. C. Miller,Smart homes

that monitor breathing and heart rate, in CHI15, pp. 837846, ACM, 2015.
Vital-Radio, a wireless sensing technology that monitors breathing and
heart rate without body contact. Vital-Radio uses a radar technique called FMCW
(Frequency Modulated Carrier Wave) to separate the reflections arriving from
objects into different buckets depending on the distance between these objects and
the device. Natural environments have a large number of reflectors.
Vital-Radio works by using wireless signals to monitor the minute
movements due to inhaling, exhaling, and heartbeats. Specifically, it transmits a
low-power wireless signal and measures the time it takes for the signal to reflect
back to the device. The reflection time depends on the distance of the reflector to
the device, and changes as the reflector moves. Vital-Radio measures these
changes and analyzes them to extract breathing and heartbeats.
3.1.6 N. Patwari, L. Brewer, and et al., Breathfinding: A wireless network
that monitors and locates breathing in a home, in IEEE Journal of Selected
Topics in Signal Processing, pp. 3042, 2014.
This paper explores using RSS measurements on the links between
commercial wireless devices to locate where a breathing person is located and to

22

estimate their breathing rate, in a home, while the person is sitting, lying down,
standing, or sleeping.
The persons breathing rate can be estimated using the RSS measurements.
A change-detection method is used to identify (BREAKPOINTS) times at which
this motion occurs, negate it, and then accurately estimate breathing rate even
during short periods of motion. Variance-based radio tomographic imaging (VRTI)
uses the variance of RSS on links in a wireless network to identify the location of
a moving person in a building.
3.1.7 O. J. Kaltiokallio and et al., Non-invasive respiration rate monitoring
using a single cots tx-rx pair, in IPSN 2014, 2014.
This paper addresses respiration rate monitoring using low-cost commercial
off-the-shelf transceivers. It is composed of a single TX-RX pair, which
significantly improves applicability of existing signal strength based breathing
monitoring systems. The work in this paper addresses two major problems that are
faced when conducting breathing monitoring using RSS measurements of a single
TX-RX pair. First, the breathing signal is not observable in the RSS
measurements. This problem can be addressed by increasing the signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) and utilizing frequency diversity to enrich the information content of
noisy RSS measurements. The Second problem to be addressed is, other
movements of the person (a posture change) which we refer to as motion
interference, dominate the frequency content of the RSS measurement. A hidden
Markov model (HMM) is developed to identify motion interference.

3.1.8 H. Abdelnasser, K. A. Harras, and M. Youssef, Ubibreathe: A

ubiquitous non-invasive wifi-based breathing estimator, 2015.
UbiBreathe has four components: The RSS is first processed by the
Breathing Signal Extractor module that filters the noise from the input signal and

23

extracts the breathing signal. The extracted breathing signal is then passed to the
Robust Breathing Rate Extractor module that filters outliers and provides a more
stable signal reading. The Apnea Detector module applies further de-noising
techniques (Wavelet de-noising) to the breathing signal and accordingly checks for
the absence of the breathing pattern. Finally, the Real-time Visualizer module
combines the output of the different modules in a user friendly visual output and
raises alarms when an apnea is detected.

3.1.9 Jian Liu, Yan Wang, Yingying Chen, JieYang, Xu Chen, Jerry Cheng,
Tracking Vital Signs During Sleep Leveraging Off-the-shelf WiFi, in ACM,
2015
The data is processed to filter out the CSI measurements that contain sleep
events (e..g, going to bed and turn over) or large environmental changes such as
people walking by via Coarse Sleep Event Detection and Filtering (Hampel filter).
After coarse sleep event detection and data filtering, based on the different
frequency information embedded inside the CSI measurements, the input is fed
into Breathing Rate Estimation. This system first performs Data Calibration and
Subcarrier Selection to preprocess the data and select only the subcarriers sensitive
to minute human body movements. Then a method is developed, Breathing Cycle
Identification (Peak finding algorithm) to estimate the breathing rate for single
person.

3.1.10 Xuefeng Liu, Jiannong Cao, Shaojie Tang, Jiaqi Wen and Peng Guo ,
Contactless Respiration Monitoring via Off-the-shelf WiFi Devices, 2015
This system extracts fine-grained wireless CSI around a person from offthe-shelf WiFi device to detect the minute movements and provide accurate
breathing and heart rates estimation concurrently. The raw CSI measurements are

24

passed through the preprocessing unit in which the noise and outliers are removed.
Afterwards, the CSIs are analyzed to decide whether there are some changes occur
in the CSI data. If the answer is NO, breathing rate will be estimated. Otherwise,
the data are further analyzed to see whether the change of CSIs is caused by the
change of sleeping postures, or by the sleep apnea.
3.2 Summary Of Literature Review
Author

Title

Year
&
Pub

Findings

Limitations

25

Tian Hao, iSleep:

2013

This paper presents iSleep, a The

Guoliang

Unobtrusive

ACM

practical system to monitor microphone sampling

Xing,

Sleep Quality

an individual's sleep quality is a major source of

Gang

Monitoring

using

Zhou

using

phone. iSleep uses the built- The

Smartphones

in

off-the-shelf
microphone

smart- energy
of

high-rate

consumption.
environmental

the noise can affect the

smartphone to detect the accuracy of detecting

events that are closely related sleep-related

events.

to sleep quality, including Some of the metrics

body movement, couch and used to calculate the
snore, and infers quantitative score

of

Sleep

measures of sleep quality. Disturbance cannot be

iSleep adopts a lightweight measured by iSleep.
decision-tree-based
algorithm to classify various
events based on carefully
selected acoustic features,
and

tracks

the

dynamic

ambient noise characteristics

to improve the robustness of
classification.

Author

Title

Year
&
Pub

Findings

Limitations

26

Ching-

Unconstrained

2014

This

paper

introduced

Wei

Video

IEEE

novel motion model to detect is barely perceptible

Wang,

Monitoring of

subtle,

Andrew

Breathing

signals from video, a new 3D bed clothing and the

Hunter,

Behavior.

unsupervised

cyclical

a The breathing motion

breathing (due to obscuration by

self-adaptive subtlety

of

the

Neil

breathing template to learn breathing

Gravill,

individuals normal breathing movements),

and

and

patterns online, and a robust being

the

Simon

action classification method movements are prone

Matusie

to

wicz

breathing activities and limb Consequently,

recognize

cyclical

abnormal to self-occlusion.

movements. This technique standard

the
motion

avoids imposing positional detection and activity

constraints on the patient, recognition

methods

allowing patients to sleep on do not function well.

their back or side, with or Can

be

without facing the camera, affected

negatively
by

fully or partially occluded by low-light

typical
sleeping

the bed clothes. Moreover, environment and also

shallow

and

abdominal raise privacy concerns

breathing patterns do not to the users.

adversely

affect

the

performance of the method,

and

it

is

insensitive

to

environmental settings such

as infrared lighting levels
Author

Title

Year
&
Pub

and camera view angles.

Findings

Limitations

27

Ching-

Inconspicuous

2014

In this paper, an e-textile bed This system can still

Wei

On-Bed

IEE

sheet with a dense pressure- make

Wang,

Respiratory

sensitive array system is measurements if the

Andrew

Rate

introduced

Hunter,

Monitoring

human respiratory rate under moving or is in a side

to

measure subject under test is

Neil

any

Gravill,

environment. This system

and

continuously

Simon

patients pressure distribution

Matusie

on the bed. Respiratory rate

wicz

and sleep positions could be

home/clinical position.
detects

extracted via analyzing timestamped

pressure

map

sequences. The e-textile bed

sheet was selected to be a
normal

human-sensor

interface because it is close

to a regular fabric-made bed
sheet in feel and comfort.

Author

Title

Year
&

Findings

inaccurate

Limitations

28

Pub
R.Ravich

WiBreath:

2015

In this paper, WiBreathe is It

andran,

Estimating

IEEE

presented,

Never

whole-home abnormal

breathing

S. Elliot, Respiration

respiration

C.

system that reliably estimates positions and change

Yu,

Ke- Rate

Using

G. Wireless

Mayank,

Signals

G.

rate

tracks

sensing under different sleep

respiration rate in a users of

positions.

changing environment. This Large

body

Natural

system leverages

cause

Sidhant,

Settings in the

narrowband

and

Home.

monitor the breathing of an the signal strength.

S.N.Pate

in

sleep

wireless movements

signals

to severe disruptions in

individual anywhere in a
home, even when the person
is

behind

Specifically,
algorithm
chooses

the
the

walls.
adaptive

clusters

and

between multiple

respiratory

rate

extraction

algorithms, and adapts to a

dynamically
environment.

changing

29

Author

Title

Year
&
Pub
F. Adib, Smart Homes 2015

Findings

Limitations

H. Mao, that Monitor ACM

technique called FMCW to identify the presence

Z.

Breathing and

separate

Kabelac,

Heart Rate

arriving from objects into breathing and heart

Vital-Radio uses a radar Non-human

the

motion:

reflections of a pet and output its

D. Katabi

different buckets depending rate assuming it is

& R. C.

on the

Miller

these objects and the device. environment.

distance

between another user in the

Natural environments have a

large number of reflectors.
To address this issue, VitalRadios operation consists of
three steps:
Step1:

Isolate

Reflections

from Different Users and

Eliminate

Reflections

off

Furniture and Walls.

Step2:
Reflections

Identifying
Involving

Breathing and Heart Rate.

Step3: Extracting Breathing
and Heart Rate.

30

Author

Title

N.

Breathfinding

Patwari,

: A Wireless IEEE

standard

L.

Network That

which measure only RSS to people in the same

Brewer,

Monitors and

monitor and localize the deployment area.

and et al., Locates

Year
&
Pub
2014

Findings

Limitations

This paper explores using It

wireless

devices multiple

breathing of a person in a

Breathing in a

building, without any prior

Home

calibration. The core of the

idea of RSS-based breathing
localization is that a links
RSS

measurements

are

sensitive to breathing when

the breathing person is near
the link line and there is no
other

motion

occurring

nearby. From many links

RSS data, breathing rate is
estimated and localize
breathing

but

motionless person.

doesnt

otherwise

track
breathing

31

Author

Title

Findings

Non-invasive

Year
&
Pub
IPSN

N.
Patwari,

Respiration

2014

addresses

L.

Rate

problems that are faced when breathing monitoring

Brewer,

Monitoring

conducting

and et al., Using

Limitations

The work in this paper It is expected that for

two

major small

breathing is considerably harder.

monitoring

using

RSS

Single COTS

measurements of a single

TX-RX Pair.

TX-RX

pair.

First,

breathing

signal

observable

in

is
the

the
not
RSS

measurements. This problem

can

be

addressed

by

increasing the signal-to-noise

ratio (SNR) and utilizing
frequency diversity to enrich
the information content of
noisy RSS measurements.
The Second problem to be
addressed

is,

other

movements of the person (a

posture change) which we
refer

children

to

as

motion

interference, dominate the

frequency content of the RSS
measurement.

hidden

Markov model (HMM) is

developed to identify motion
interference.

32

Author

Title

Year
&
Pub

Findings

Limitations

33

H.

UbiBreathe:

ACM

UbiBreathe is a software- It doesnt work when

Abdelnas

A Ubiquitous 2015

only solution that can work the sleepers are under

ser, K.A. non-Invasive

with

Harras,

device without the need of positions.

and

WiFi-based

M. Breathing

Youssef

Estimator

any

WiFi-enabled the change of sleep

any special hardware, can

monitor multiple persons in
parallel,

detect

breathing

anomalies, and display the

full breathing signal in realtime.

The

basic

idea

UbiBreathe leverages is that

the chest/lungs are large
organs, and the inhaling and
exhaling

motion

of

breathing person causes a

dominant

periodic

component in the received

WiFi signal at a receiver
positioned
chest.

on

This

the

users

modulated

WiFi signal due to the

breathing process can be
analyzed to extract different
useful information about the
persons breathing pattern.

34

Author

Title

Jian Liu, Tracking

Year
&
Pub
ACM

Signs 2015

Findings

In this paper, a system is proposed to track the vital

Yan

Vital

signs of both breathing rate and heart rate during

Wang,

During Sleep

sleep by using off-the-shelf WiFi without any

Yingying

Leveraging

wearable or dedicated devices. This system re-uses

Chen,

Off-the-shelf

existing WiFi network and exploits the fine-grained

JieYang

WiFi

channel

information

to

capture

the

minute

,Xu

movements caused by breathing and heartbeats.

Chen,

Our system thus has the potential to be widely

Jerry

deployed

Cheng

monitoring. The developed algorithm (peak finding

and

perform

continuous

long-term

algorithm) makes use of the channel information in

both time and frequency domain to estimate
breathing and heart rates, and it works well when
either individual or two persons are in bed.

35

Author

Title

Year
&
Pub

Findings

Limitations

36

X. Liu, J. Contactless

2015

This system relies on the It

Cao,

IEEE

COTS WiFi devices, is able activities like getting-

Tang,

S. Respiration
Monitoring

Jiaqi Wen via

to track abnormal breathing ups

identify

or

hand

Off-the-

accurately, and works well movements using CSI.

WiFi

when the sleepers are at It doesnt track the

and Peng shelf

Guo

doesnt

Devices

different sleeping positions respiration of a person

or even change of sleeping in the presence of
positions.
continuously

This

system these activities.

collects

the It

doesnt

fine-grained wireless channel multiple

state

information

CSI, the rhythmic patterns

associated with respiration
and abrupt changes due to
body

identified.

3.2 Inference from Literature Survey

movement

persons

(CSI) simultaneously.

around a person. From the

the

monitor

are

37

According to the sensors adopted, existing respiration monitoring systems

which are able to track human respiration can be largely divided into three
categories:
systems based on pressure sensor arrays,
systems using camera visions, and
systems based on RF signals.
Compared with the existing works that rely on RSS measurements, this
system can track un-normal breathing (e.g. sleep apnea) and can also provide
breathing information when the person is under different sleeping positions by
applying CSI. The existing system detects the presence of a person or identifies
human gestures and also monitors the breath. However, these systems rely on
special hardware devices attached to a human body.
In the proposed system, under different sleeping positions fine-grained
respiration information of a person can be extracted with off-the-shelf WiFi
devices by introducing a breath monitoring system which is based on WiFi signals.

38

CHAPTER 4
DISCUSSION

4.1 Methodologies
4.1.1 Channel State Information (CSI)
Channel state information or channel status information (CSI) is
information that estimates the channel by representing the channel properties of a
communication link. More specifically, CSI describes how a signal propagates
from the transmitter(s) to the receiver(s) and reveals the combined effect of, for
instance, scattering, fading, and power decay with distance.
CSI needs to be estimated at the receiver and usually quantized and fed
back to the transmitter. Therefore, the transmitter and receiver can have different
CSI. The CSI at the transmitter and the CSI at the receiver are sometimes referred
to as CSIT and CSIR, respectively.
According to the definition of CSI, only Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM)-based WLAN systems can demonstrate the frequency
diversity in CSI since they use multiple subcarriers for data transmission.
The CSI information represents signal strength and phase information for
OFDM subcarriers. The received signal can be modeled as,
y=Hx+n
where y is the received signal, x is the transmitted signal, n is the channel
noise and H is the CSI which is a complex number matrix that indicates the
channel frequency response of each individual subcarrier for every spatial stream.
This way, CSI for all subcarriers and all spatial streams is a m n w matrix,
where m is the number of transmitter antennas, n is the number of receiver

39

antennas and w is the number of subcarriers. Such a fine-grained matrix can

accurately capture the temporal and spectral conditions of the channel and changes
caused by small-scale multipath effects.
Thus, CSI of all subcarriers can be estimated according to the received signal
equation as

y
^
H=
x , which is a fine-grained value from the PHY layer that

describes the channel gain from TX baseband to RX baseband.

CSI of a single subcarrier is mathematically represented as,
j sin { h }
= e
, where is the amplitude and is the phrase of each

subcarrier.
4.2 Comparing the wireless features

Channel response vs Received energy

The CSI is the channel response reflecting the state of wireless channels

between transmitter and receiver, while the RSS is only the received energy power
at the receiver side. The scattering and reflecting effects caused by minute
movements of breathing will directly affect the channel state rather than the
received energy.

Higher Frequency Granularity

The scattering and reflecting effects caused by breathing can have different

effect on different sub-carriers. Analyzing sub-carriers of CSI thus provides higher

opportunity to capture the minute movements than using the RSS which can be
regarded as the averaged power over the whole channel bandwidth.

Higher Amplitude Granularity

40

The RSS is an integer with low granularity (1dB). The minute movement of
breathing generally causes little changes on the RSS data. On the other hand, the
CSI can provide much higher resolution in amplitude.
4.3 Data
4.3.1 Topography Database
The topographic database is used as source material for map products. In
addition, the database is applicable to be used, for instance, in various GPS-based
applications for positioning, route search, data collection and maintenance.
The topographic database is also used in planning of buildings and land use
and in different research and monitoring functions associated with environment.
4.4 Performance Metrics
Quantization of CSI
Here, it is well known that different frequency domain components of a
signal have an uncorrelated fading, so it is called as frequency selective fading.
This means 30 subcarrier groups are occurred different fading effect. If we use
only the maximum amplitude of subcarrier groups, distance estimation errors will
be taken place irregularly. In our study, we average the 30 subcarrier groups to
reduce the error caused by the frequency selective fading, that is, CSI quantization.
We give a different weight to each other sub-carrier because signal attenuation
effect is frequency-related. For CSI value of the high frequency group is much
weighted that that of the low one.
The quantization of CSI is calculated as an equation above,
CSI eff

1
K

fk
k1

Hk

41

f0

where

is the central frequency,

fk

and | H k

| are the frequency

and amplitude of the f th subcarrier of CSI.

Scaling of CSI
The measured CSI from a commodity NIC is provided in a normalized
form to be directly utilized for channel control. This means there is no relationship
between the distance and the measured CSI value. So, the measured one should be
compensated by Automatic Gain Control (AGC) which is also obtained from the
NIC. AGC is the gain to maintain a constant range of the amplitude of the signal
input to the A-D converter. Usually formula to obtain the RSSI is provided with
the below equation.
Prssi = RSSI 44 agc

where

Prssi

is the received signal strength in dBm, RSSI is received

signal strength which is relative to an internal reference in Db and arc is an

indicator for the compensation.
The quantization CSI and arc are applied to scale the measured CSI
in order to reflect the received signal strength as below equation; it is a conversion
from the normalized one to the radio propagation dependent one.

42

where Pcsi

is the CSI strength in dBm and arc is an indicator for the

compensation.
Path loss propagation model
Radio frequency delivery is modeled with a free-space loss which is the
signal strength attenuation in proportion to the propagation distance. The path loss
propagation model is a formula that shows how the signal strength is decreased on
increasing the distance. This formula provides a basement to estimate the distance
with RF properties as RSSI or CSI. The most common model is represented as
follow.

where P0 is the signal strength at distance of unit distance d 0 , n is the

path loss fading exponent, and d is the measured distance from the transmitter.
Path loss fading exponent is a quantification of environmental factors such as RF
gain, antenna gain, refraction, shadowing and propagation loss that affect the
propagation of electromagnetic wave. It is known that an environment having
complicated structures; such as office, has a value of about 4 or more. On the other
hand, it has a value of about 2 in simple environment; such as corridor.

43

CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION

5.1 CONCLUSION
By using off-the-shelf WiFi devices deployed in bedrooms, some finegrained information associated with sleep including the persons respiration,
sleeping postures and activities like rollovers, can be continuously tracked using
the channel state information. From the CSI, rhythmic patterns are extracted
associated with respiration and abrupt changes due to the body movement.
Compared to existing sleep monitoring systems that usually require special
devices attached to human body (i.e. probes, head belt, and wrist band), THE
CONTACTLESS RESPIRATION MONITORING VIA WiFi DEVICES system
is completely contactless. In addition, different from many vision-based sleep
monitoring systems, it is robust to low-light environments and does not raise
privacy concerns. It can reliably track a persons respiration and sleeping postures
and rollovers in different conditions.

44

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47