When Healthcare Meets Off-the-Shelf WiFi: A Non-Wearable and Low-Costs Approach for In-Home Monitoring

Abstract

As elderly population grows, social and health care begin to face validation challenges, in-home monitoring is becoming a focus for professionals in the field. Governments urgently need to improve the quality of healthcare services at lower costs while ensuring the comfort and independence of the elderly. This work presents an in-home monitoring approach based on off-the-shelf WiFi, which is low-costs, non-wearable and makes all-round daily healthcare information available to caregivers. The proposed approach can capture fine-grained human pose figures even through a wall and track detailed respiration status simultaneously by off-the-shelf WiFi devices. Based on them, behavioral data, physiological data and the derived information (e.g., abnormal events and underlying diseases), of the elderly could be seen by caregivers directly. We design a series of signal processing methods and a neural network to capture human pose figures and extract respiration status curves from WiFi Channel State Information (CSI). Extensive experiments are conducted and according to the results, off-the-shelf WiFi devices are capable of capturing fine-grained human pose figures, similar to cameras, even through a wall and track accurate respiration status, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach for in-home monitoring.