Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2024

Abstract

Heart rate is a key vital sign that can be used to understand an individual’s health condition. Recently, remote sensing techniques, especially acoustic-based sensing, have received increasing attention for their ability to non-invasively detect heart rate via commercial mobile devices such as smartphones and smart speakers. However, due to signal interference, existing methods have primarily focused on monitoring a single user and required a large separation between them when monitoring multiple people. These limitations hinder many common use cases such as couples sharing the same bed or two or more people located in close proximity. In this paper, we present an approach that can minimize interference and thereby enable simultaneous heart rate monitoring of multiple individuals in close proximity using a commonly available smart speaker prototype. Our user study, conducted under various real-life scenarios, demonstrates the system’s accuracy in sensing two users’ heart rates when they are seated next to each other with a median error of 0.66 beats per minute (bpm). Moreover, the system can successfully monitor up to four people in close proximity.

Keywords

heart rate monitoring, acoustic-based sensing, smart speakers, multi-person tracking, spatial localization, FMCW

Discipline

Health Information Technology | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Sensors

Volume

24

Issue

2

First Page

1

Last Page

19

ISSN

1424-8220

Identifier

10.3390/s24020382

Publisher

MDPI

Copyright Owner and License

Authors CC-BY

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.3390/s24020382

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