A TensorBeat: Tensor Decomposition for Monitoring Multi-Person Breathing Beats with Commodity WiFi

Breathing signal monitoring can provide important clues for human’s physical health problems. Comparing to existing techniques that require wearable devices and special equipment, a more desirable approach is to provide contact-free and long-term breathing rate monitoring by exploiting wireless signals. In this paper, we propose TensorBeat, a system to employ channel state information (CSI) phase difference data to intelligently estimate breathing rates for multiple persons with commodity WiFi devices. The main idea is to leverage the tensor decomposition technique to handle the CSI phase difference data. The proposed TensorBeat scheme first obtains CSI phase difference data between pairs of antennas at the WiFi receiver to create CSI tensor data. Then Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition is applied to obtain the desired breathing signals. A stable signal matching algorithm is developed to find the decomposed signal pairs, and a peak detection method is applied to estimate the breathing rates for multiple persons. Our experimental study shows that TensorBeat can achieve high accuracy under different environments for multi-person breathing rate monitoring.