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It's not easy sleeping with tubes up your nose, but when doctors want to monitor a person's breathing they have few other choices. A new wireless system promises to do away with intrusive medical technology – but instead it might end up being used as a surveillance tool to track people's movements and activities behind closed doors.
While testing some new equipment, Neal Patwari of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues noticed variations in wireless signal strength triggered by a person's breathing, but only at certain locations around the room. So they set up an experiment to test whether a wireless network could reliably measure breathing rate.
In the test, Patwari lay in a hospital bed surrounded by 20 inexpensive, off-the-shelf wireless units. These were arrayed so that they sent 2.4 gigahertz radio waves across the bed – the same frequency as Wi-Fi – but with one-thousandth the power of a laptop's wireless card. The units measured the signal strength four times a second – fast enough to measure fluctuations caused by individual breaths.After collecting 30 seconds of data, the network was able to accurately estimate a person's breathing rate to within 0.4 breaths per minute.Patwari concludes that the wireless signals bent around his chest as it rose with each inhalation, causing them to travel a longer distance and decrease slightly in power.
While testing some new equipment, Neal Patwari of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues noticed variations in wireless signal strength triggered by a person's breathing, but only at certain locations around the room. So they set up an experiment to test whether a wireless network could reliably measure breathing rate.
In the test, Patwari lay in a hospital bed surrounded by 20 inexpensive, off-the-shelf wireless units. These were arrayed so that they sent 2.4 gigahertz radio waves across the bed – the same frequency as Wi-Fi – but with one-thousandth the power of a laptop's wireless card. The units measured the signal strength four times a second – fast enough to measure fluctuations caused by individual breaths.After collecting 30 seconds of data, the network was able to accurately estimate a person's breathing rate to within 0.4 breaths per minute.Patwari concludes that the wireless signals bent around his chest as it rose with each inhalation, causing them to travel a longer distance and decrease slightly in power.
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