SleepGuardian: An RF-Based Healthcare System Guarding Your Sleep from Afar

The ever accelerating process of urbanization urges more and more population into the swelling cities. While city residents are enjoying an entertaining life supported by advanced informatics techniques like 5G and cloud computing, the same technologies have also gradually deprived their sleep, which is crucial for their wellness. Therefore, sleep monitoring has drawn significant attention from both the research and industry communities. In this article, we first review the sleep monitoring issue and point out three essential properties of an ideal sleep healthcare system, that is, realtime guarding, fine-grained logging, and cost-effectiveness. Based on the analysis, we present SleepGuardian, a Radio Frequency (RF) based sleep healthcare system leveraging signal processing, edge computing and machine learning. SleepGuardian offers an offline sleep logging service and an online abnormality warning service. The offline service provides a fine-grained sleep log like timing and regularity of bed time, onset of sleep and night time awakenings. The online service keeps guarding the subject for any abnormal behaviors during sleep like intensive body twitches and a sudden seizure attack. Once an abnormality happens, it will automatically warn the designated contacts like a nearby emergency room or a close-by relative. We prototype SleepGuardian with low-cost WiFi devices and evaluate it in real scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that SleepGuardian is very effective.