Research led by Katia Obrackza, director of CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz, shows how the signal from a household Wi-Fi device can be used to monitor heart rate with state-of-the-art accuracy, with no need for a separate wearable device.
Dubbed “Pulse-Fi,” the technology uses a Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver that runs a signal processing and machine learning algorithm. Obraczka and her team, which included doctoral student Nayan Bhatia and visiting high school researcher Pranay Kocheta, trained the algorithm to distinguish even the faintest of signal variations caused by a human heartbeat while filtering out all changes caused by movement or the environment.
Not only is Pulse-Fi very precise, measuring heart rate in five seconds with clinical-level accuracy, but it is also cost-effective, using Wi-Fi-emitting chips that cost between $5 and $10.
Beyond heart rate, researchers want to expand the system to detect breathing rate, which can help detect conditions such as sleep apnea.
Learn more from UC Santa Cruz News.
Watch a demo on KSBW Action News 8.