From obstructive sleep apnea to catharpia period (also known as sleep whine), there is a lot Breathing problems They present themselves at night when we are in bed. This makes them difficult to detect and even more difficult to diagnose. Fortunately, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a way to use your existing Wi-Fi router to measure your breathing and identify if you’re struggling to breathe.
If you are using a file The best Wi-Fi routers or even one The best mesh Wi-Fi systems At home, these devices are constantly broadcasting radio frequencies. As these invisible frequencies travel around your home, they bounce off or pass through everything around them, including walls, furniture, and even people.
Your movements and even your breathing slightly alter the path of your router’s Wi-Fi signal as it travels to your smartphone, laptop, and other connected devices. So the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) devised a way to analyze these small changes to see if someone in your home is having trouble breathing.
BreatheSmart and Wi-Fi signals
Back in 2020 when ventilators were scarce due to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jason Coder, who leads the Joint Spectrometers Group, and other NIST scientists were thinking of a way they could help. However, since there was no time to develop a new device, they thought of ways they could use existing technology instead.
Coder worked with colleagues in the FDA’s Office of Science and Engineering along with research colleague Susanna Mosleh to use existing Wi-Fi routers to measure the breathing rate of a person in the same room.
To do this, they used channel state information (CSI)—a collection of signals sent from a laptop or smartphone to a router—to monitor for distortions when a Wi-Fi signal bounces off a person. This required the team at NIST to tweak the router’s firmware to get these CSI streams more frequently (up to 10 times per second) so they could get a more detailed picture of how the signal was changing.
Cooder and colleagues created a special manikin that replicated breathing conditions such as abnormally slow breathing (bradypnea), abnormally rapid breathing (tachypnea), asthma, pneumonia and other chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) in an anechoic chamber along with a router. and a wifi receiver. When the troll breathes, the movement of his chest changes the path of the Wi-Fi signal. While scientists have been able to collect a lot of data, they still have to make sense of it all.
For this, they developed a deep learning algorithm called BreatheSmart that combs through all captured CSI data. The algorithm was then able to recognize patterns that indicated various breathing problems with a success rate of 99.54%.
framework for future programmes
Although NIST’s BreatheSmart algorithm works well and is able to identify a number of different breathing conditions, it won’t be released to the public anytime soon. Instead, Coder and Mosleh hope developers use the process presented in their file Research paper (Opens in a new tab) To create other programs for remote breathing monitoring. Coder provided more information about NIST’s work on developing BreatheSmart in a press release (Opens in a new tab)saying:
“All of the ways we collect data is done on software on the access point (in this case, the router), which can be done by an app on the phone. This work attempts to show how someone can develop and test their own algorithm. This is a framework to help them in Obtain relevant information.
Now that scientists have shown how to use Wi-Fi signals to measure spirometry, we could soon see other applications for the technology. Who knows – a Wi-Fi router might save your life one day.
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