Your Smart Speaker Can "Hear" Your Heartbeat!

Abstract

Vital sign monitoring is a common practice amongst medical professionals, and plays a key role in patient care and clinical diagnosis. Traditionally, dedicated equipment is employed to monitor these vital signs. For example, electrocardiograms (ECG) with 3-12 electrodes are attached to the target chest for heartbeat monitoring. In the last few years, wireless sensing becomes a hot research topic and wireless signal itself is utilized for sensing purposes without requiring the target to wear any sensors. The contact-free nature of wireless sensing makes it particularly appealing in current COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, promising progress has been achieved and the sensing granularity has been pushed to millimeter level, fine enough to monitor respiration which causes a chest displacement of 5 mm. While a great success with respiration monitoring, it is still very challenging to monitor heartbeat due to the extremely subtle chest displacement (0.1 - 0.5 mm) - smaller than 10% of that caused by respiration. What makes it worse is that the tiny heartbeat-caused chest displacement is buried inside the respiration-caused displacement. In this paper, we show the feasibility of employing the popular smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) to monitor an individual's heartbeats in a contact-free manner. To extract the submillimeter heartbeat motion in the presence of other interference movements, a series of novel signal processing schemes are employed. We successfully prototype the first real-time heartbeat monitoring system using a commodity smart speaker. Experiment results show that the proposed system can monitor a target's heartbeat accurately, achieving a median heart rate estimation error of 0.75 beat per minute (bpm), and a median heartbeat interval estimation error of 13.28 ms (less than 1.8%), outperforming even some popular commodity products available on the market.