MWC: New breathing monitor works through Wi-Fi

At Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona this week, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) unveiled a new intelligent breathing monitor that works through a home Wi-Fi network. The device is able to recognise a patient’s breathing, measure it and store it in its system so that it is available through any mobile device. In this way, both doctors and family members can access the patient’s breathing data in real time.

The measurement of respiration is an important indicator for the assessment of a person’s health. Nowadays, most measuring instruments require physical contact, which means that patients do not use them all the time due to the inconvenience of having to wear them over 24 hours. However, this device uses Channel State Information (CSI) technology, which allows the measurement of changes in the person’s breathing using a non-contact method.

The user only has to connect the monitor to the home Wi-Fi network so that the physiological signal of the patient begins to be measured. Through a mechanism of signal analysis and signal processing, the device is able to recognise and process the patient’s breathing in real time and process it.

“Channel State Information (CSI) is one of the areas in which ITRI has been working on recently,” says Dr Sheng-Lin Chou, Deputy General Director of Information and Communications Laboratories at ITRI. “The analysis and processing of signals make non-contact breathing measurements possible. It can not only be applicable to smart healthcare, for instance, it could also be used in vehicles to detect driver’s status.”

In recent years, ITRI has also transformed its research domain from hardware-driven to software centric, and further expand on using ICT in different domains. This year, ITRI joins the IDB-led Taiwan Pavilion for the third time to showcase its newest development in the framework of IoT (Internet of Things).