ECG-grained Cardiac Monitoring Using RFID

Ningning Wang, Tianya Zhao, Shiwen Mao, Harrison X. Bai, Zhicheng Jiao, Xuyu Wang

Abstract: Heartbeat signals are useful to disease prediction, sub-health diagnosis, fatigue warning, and even emotion estimation. There is a compelling need for contactless, easy-to-deploy, and long-term heartbeat monitoring. This paper presents a contactless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based system for heartbeat monitoring that leverages the insight that RFID signal fluctuations induced by chest motion are synchronous with both respiration and heartbeat. The proposed system collects the temporal phase information from the tag pair on the body to extract heartbeat signals using a sequence of signal processing techniques. We propose a signal separation method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to obtain heart rate after preprocessing. Furthermore, the estimated signal is input to an enhanced variational autoencoder (VAE) model to recover the heartbeat waveform. Implemented with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID devices, the system achieves accurate heart rate monitoring with less than 3% relative errors. The detected waveform exhibits a median cosine similarity of 0.83 as compared with the ground truth, which validate the system’s wide applicability and high reliability for fine-grained, contactless heartbeat monitoring.