SlpRoF: Improving the Temporal Coverage and Robustness of RF-Based Vital Sign Monitoring During Sleep

Most existing RF-based vital sign monitoring systems either assume that a human subject is stationary or discard measurements when motion is detected in order to output reliable respiration rates and heart rates. Such an assumption greatly limits the usability of these systems in practice. Even during sleep, one can undergo various body states including turns and involuntary twitches in light sleep, motionlessness during deep sleep, or abnormal limb movements due to sleep disorders such as restless legs syndrome. In this work, we develop SlpRoF, a low-cost contact-free system using a commercial-off-the-shelf UWB radar that achieves high temporal coverage and high accuracy in vital sign monitoring during sleep. By classifying body states into the motionless state, limb movement state, and torso movement state, and extracting vital signs during the first two states, it directly increases effective reporting periods over nights. By analyzing high-order harmonics and leveraging spatial diversity in captured signals from multiple on-body areas, it improves the accuracy of heart rate estimations and thus indirectly increases temporal coverage through reliable assessments. Experiment results show that SlpRoF is able to achieve an average median absolute error (MAE) of 0.44 beats per minute (bpm) in respiration rates, 1.55s in respiration intervals, and 0.9 bpm for heart rates, respectively.