WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed – News
Heart rate is one of the most basic and important indicators of health, providing a snapshot into a person’s physical activity, stress and anxiety, hydration level, and more.
Traditionally, measuring heart rate requires some sort of wearable device, whether that be a smart watch or hospital-grade machinery. But new research from engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows how the signal from a household WiFi device can be used for this crucial health monitoring with state-of-the-art accuracy—without the need for a wearable.
Their proof of concept work demonstrates that one day, anyone could take advantage of this non-intrusive WiFi-based health monitoring technology in their homes. The team proved their technique works with low-cost WiFi devices, demonstrating its usefulness for low resource settings.
A study demonstrating the technology, which the researchers have coined “Pulse-Fi,” was published in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT).
Measuring with WiFi
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Katia Obraczka and Ph.D. student Nayan Bhatia in the lab.
A team of researchers at UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering that included Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Katia Obraczka, Ph.D. student Nayan Bhatia, and high school student and visiting researcher Pranay Kocheta designed a system for accurately measuring heart rate that combines low-cost WiFi devices with a machine learning algorithm.
WiFi devices push out radio frequency waves into physical space around them and toward a receiving device, typically a computer or phone. As the waves pass through objects in space, some of the wave is absorbed into those objects, causing mathematically detectable changes in the wave.
Pulse-Fi uses a WiFi transmitter and receiver, which runs Pulse-Fi’s signal processing and machine learning algorithm. They trained the algorithm to distinguish even the faintest variations in signal caused by a human heart beat by filtering out all other changes to the signal in the environment or caused by activity like movement.
“The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.
Dynamic results
The team ran experiments with 118 participants and found that after only five seconds of signal processing, they could measure heart rate with clinical-level accuracy. At five seconds of monitoring, they saw only half a beat-per-minute of error, with longer periods of monitoring time increasing the accuracy.
The team found that the Pulse-Fi system worked regardless of the position of the equipment in the room or the person whose heart rate was being measured—no matter if they were sitting, standing, lying down, or walking, the system still performed. For each of the 118 participants, they tested 17 different body positions with accurate results.
These results were found using ultra-low-cost ESP32 chips, which retail between $5 and $10 and Raspberry Pi chips, which cost closer to $30. Results from the Raspberry Pi experiments show even better performance. More expensive WiFi devices like those found in commercial routers would likely further improve the accuracy of their system.
“Want to Explore This Research Further?”
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→ https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e6f3293b-d4c9-44ec-95c1-ce78eacb3fa9
These sources collectively explore the emerging field of Wi-Fi sensing, a technology that leverages existing Wi-Fi signals to detect various phenomena beyond traditional communication. Specifically, the articles highlight its significant potential in healthcare applications, such as non-invasive vital sign monitoring for breathing and heart rate, gait analysis, and fall detection, offering benefits like continuous patient surveillance and privacy preservation over conventional methods. While demonstrating remarkable accuracy with low-cost hardware like ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, the texts also address technical challenges like multi-person interference and signal quality, alongside crucial privacy and security concerns that arise from using ubiquitous Wi-Fi infrastructure for sensitive biometric data collection. The ongoing standardization efforts by the IEEE 802.11bf task group underscore the technology’s growing importance and its anticipated integration into future devices for various smart home and eHealth applications.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed – News
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