Description

Respiration monitoring estimates breathing rate (and sometimes depth) from periodic chest-wall motion that modulates a CSI stream. Phase-based and csi-ratio-based features dominate because the millimetre-scale chest displacement is below the resolution of amplitude-only systems. It is the canonical "fine-grained" test for any new CSI representation — if you cannot recover a 0.1–0.5 Hz periodicity in the chest signal, the representation is too coarse.

When it's used

  • Sleep / overnight monitoring
  • In-home health-tracking deployments
  • Driver monitoring in vehicle-cabin sensing
  • Sensitivity benchmark for new CSI feature pipelines

Limitations

  • Single-person assumption breaks when multiple people share the link
  • Sensitive to body orientation and link geometry
  • Requires several seconds of stationary observation

Source Papers

  • wang2019_d6f9 — respiration sensing as CSI use-case
  • fallani2026_04be — respiration in in-home health framework
  • wu2022_75d3 — CSI-ratio respiration sensing
  • han2026_39eb — vital-sign sensing pipeline

2 vault papers use this method

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

  • Exposing the CSI: A Systematic Investigation of CSI-based Wi-Fi Sensing Capabilities and Limitations 2023 DOI ↗
  • WiFi as Infrastructure: Valuation Impact of CSI Sensing on Smart Buildings and REIT Portfolios 2026 DOI ↗