RF-ECG: Heart Rate Variability Assessment Based on COTS RFID Tag Array

As an important indicator of autonomic regulation for circulatory function, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is widely used for general health evaluation. Apart from using dedicated devices (e.g, ECG) in a wired manner, current methods search for a ubiquitous manner by either using wearable devices, which suffer from low accuracy and limited battery life, or applying wireless techniques (e.g., FMCW), which usually utilize dedicated devices (e.g., USRP) for the measurement. To address these issues, we present RF-ECG based on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) RFID, a wireless approach to sense the human heartbeat through an RFID tag array attached on the chest area in the clothes. In particular, as the RFID reader continuously interrogates the tag array, two main effects are captured by the tag array: the reflection effect representing the RF-signal reflected from the heart movement due to heartbeat; the moving effect representing the tag movement caused by chest movement due to respiration. To extract the reflection signal from the noisy RF-signals, we develop a mechanism to capture the RF-signal variation of the tag array caused by the moving effect, aiming to eliminate the signals related to respiration. To estimate the HRV from the reflection signal, we propose a signal reflection model to depict the relationship between the RF-signal variation from the tag array and the reflection effect associated with the heartbeat. A fusing technique is developed to combine multiple reflection signals from the tag array for accurate estimation of HRV. Experiments with 15 volunteers show that RF-ECG can achieve a median error of 3% of Inter-Beat Interval (IBI), which is comparable to existing wired techniques.