COVID-Beat: a low-cost breath monitoring approach for people in quarantine during the pandemic

Abstract

Due to COVID-19, people have to adapt to the new lifestyle until scientists develop a permanent solution for this pandemic. Monitoring the respiration rate is very important for a COVID-infected person because the Coronavirus infects the pulmonary system of the person. Two problems that arise while monitoring the breath rate are: sensors are contact based and expensive for mass deployment. A conventional wearable breath rate monitoring system burdens the COVID-affected patient and exposes the caregivers to possible transmission. A contactless low-cost breath monitoring system is required, which monitors and records the breath rate continuously. This paper proposes a breath rate monitoring system called COVID-Beat, a wireless, low-cost, and contactless Wi-Fi-based continuous breath monitoring system. This sensor is developed using off-the-shelf commonly available embedded Internet of Thing device ESP32, and the performance is validated by conducting extensive experimentation. The breath rate is estimated by extracting the channel state information of the subcarriers. The system estimates the breath rate with a maximum accuracy of 99% and a minimum accuracy of 91%, achieved by advanced subcarrier selection and fusion method. The experimental results show superior performance over the existing breath rate monitoring technologies.