A cost-effective and non-invasive system for sleep and vital signs monitoring using passive RFID tags

Inadequate sleep has very bad impacts on human daily life activities. Sleep disorders are one of the main reasons for the inadequate sleep problem. Diagnosis of these disorders is a very challenging task because they occur at night when the patients are asleep and require a full night monitoring to diagnose. Conventional sleep monitoring techniques are not feasible due to various reasons such as they require the person to wear multiple invasive sensors, the cost is high and also need special environment for monitoring. In this work, we propose a non-invasive and cost-effective solution based on passive RFID technology for sleep monitoring. We attach passive RFID tags to the shirt of the person and collect low-level data which can capture the information about the vital signs of the person. The proposed solution can detect the on-bed movements which provide useful information about the sleep of the person. We propose an adaptive threshold-based technique which can effectively identify the stable breathing and apnea regions from the collected breathing signal. The stable region is used for estimating the breathing rate. Our solution can monitor vital signs such as respiration rate during the overnight sleep and can detect sleep apnea. We implement the proposed solution using COTS RFID tags in the real world scenarios and the results show that our system achieves 100% accuracy for apnea detection and above 95% for breath rate estimation.