Vital sign (e.g., respiration rate) monitoring has become increasingly more important because it offers useful clues about medical conditions such as sleep disorders. There is a compelling need for technologies that enable contact-free and easy deployment of vital sign monitoring over an extended period of time for healthcare. In this article, we present a SonarBeat system to leverage a phase-based active sonar to monitor respiration rates with smartphones. We provide a sonar phase analysis and discuss the technical challenges for respiration rate estimation utilizing an inaudible sound signal. Moreover, we design and implement the SonarBeat system, with components including signal generation, data extraction, received signal preprocessing, and breathing rate estimation with Android smartphones. Our extensive experimental results validate the superior performance of SonarBeat in different indoor environment settings.
