HB-Phone: A Bed-Mounted Geophone-Based Heartbeat Monitoring System

Heartbeat monitoring during sleep is critically important to ensuring the well-being of many people, ranging from patients to elderly. Technologies that support heartbeat monitoring should be unobtrusive, and thus solutions that are accurate and can be easily applied to existing beds is an important need that has been unfulfilled. We tackle the challenge of accurate, low-cost and easy to deploy heartbeat monitoring by investigating whether off-the-shelf analog geophone sensors can be used to detect heartbeats when installed under a bed. Geophones have the desirable property of being insensitive to lower-frequency movements, which lends itself to heartbeat monitoring as the heartbeat signal has harmonic frequencies that are easily captured by the geophone. At the same time, lower-frequency movements such as respiration, can be naturally filtered out by the geophone. With carefully-designed signal processing algorithms, we show it is possible to detect and extract heartbeats in the presence of environmental noise and other body movements a person may have during sleep. We have built a prototype sensor and conducted detailed experiments that involve 43 subjects (with IRB approval), which demonstrate that the geophone sensor is a compelling solution to long-term at-home heartbeat monitoring. We compared the average heartbeat rate estimated by our prototype and that reported by a pulse oximeter. The results revealed that the average error rate is around 1.30% over 500 data samples when the subjects were still on the bed, and 3.87% over 300 data samples when the subjects had different types of body movements while lying on the bed. We also deployed the prototype in the homes of 9 subjects for a total of 25 nights, and found that the average estimation error rate was 8.25% over more than 181 hours' data.