Smartphone-Based Acoustic Sensing for Breathing and Heartbeat Detection via AoA Clustering in Indoor Environments

Smartphones incorporate acoustic components, including a speaker and multiple microphones, which can be used as a low-cost, contactless platform for vital signs monitoring. However, extracting breathing rate (BR) and heart rate (HR) from smartphone acoustic reflections remains challenging in indoor environments because thoracic reflections are weak and are often mixed with static clutter, hand motion, environmental multipath, and other dynamic sources. In this work, we present a smartphone-based frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) acoustic sensing system that enables simultaneous BR and HR estimation using the integrated speaker and two physical microphones. Instead of processing the received signal as a single, mixed signal, the proposed method leverages distance information from the FMCW beat frequency and an angular phase index (AoA information), derived from dual-microphone and virtual aperture processing, to organize moving reflectors into a joint distance–angle–time representation. A 3D-DBSCAN clustering module is then applied to this representation to separate candidate dynamic sources from static and multipath components, without presupposing the number of sources. To further handle ambiguous cases where multiple candidate dynamic sources are detected, a Siamese similarity network is introduced as a conditional second-stage source-association module. The Siamese model compares candidate thoracic waveforms and estimates whether multiple detected components are likely to originate from the same physical source or different sources, thus improving source selection without resorting to classical blind source separation. The system was evaluated on 20 participants in two indoor environments, a laboratory and a bedroom, using three consumer smartphones and an electrocardiogram (ECG) reference device. In the smartphone-only blind configuration, the proposed pipeline achieved MAEs of 2.312 bpm for HR and 1.394 bpm for BR. In the ECG-assisted calibrated configuration, which is used to evaluate physiological coherence rather than deployable smartphone-only performance, the errors decreased to 0.462 bpm for HR and 0.091 bpm for BR. These results demonstrate that spatial clustering and conditional Siamese source pairing improve the robustness of acoustic vital sign detection using smartphones in indoor environments.