No Cameras: MIT's New Sleep Monitoring Device Identifies Your Sleeping Posture

Researchers from MIT devised a wireless, private way of monitoring a person's sleep postures without using cameras. Such monitoring takes place through the use of reflected radio signals coming from the said small devices installed on the bedroom wall.

Called the "BodyCompass," this device stands as a pioneer in terms of a home-ready, radio-frequency-based system that could provide correct sleep data minus the use of a camera or sensor attached to the body.

Introducing this system through a presentation at the UbiComp2020 conference on September 15 is Shichao Yue, a Ph.D. student using wireless sensing to analyze sleep and insomnia stages for a couple of years now.

Yue said that they thought seep posture could be another practical application for their system for medical monitoring. He worked on the project under Professor Dina Katabi's supervision. Katabi is a professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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Sleep Positions

Studying different sleep positions, Yue's project found that "stomach sleeping" increases the risk of sudden death among individuals who have epilepsy.

He also noted that sleep posture could also be used to gauge the development of Parkinson's disease as the condition takes from an individual the ability to turn over in bed.

Yue explained that people could also use BodyCompass to monitor their own sleep habits or observe their sleeping baby. The technology can be either a medical device or a consumer product, depending on what the customer needs.

Joining Yue in this paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, are Katabi Lab affiliate Hariharan Rahul, and graduating students Yuzhe Yang and Hao Wang. 

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How BodyCompass Works

BodyCompass functions by analyzing the reflection of radio signals as they bounce off objects in a room, including the human body.

Like a Wi-Fi router installed on the bedroom wall, BodyCompass delivers and collects the said signals as they go back through multiple paths. 

The researchers then mapped the signals that work from the reflections to identify body posture. However, they needed a way to find out which among the signals were bouncing off a sleeper's body and not bouncing off the bed, a nightstand, or an overhead fan.

Yue and his co-authors then discovered that their previous project in interpreting breathing patterns from signals coming from the radio could be a solution to the problem.

Accuracy of the Device

Yue and his team tested the accuracy of BodyCompass in more than 200-hour sleep data from 26 healthy individuals sleeping in their own rooms.

At the onset of this research, participants were wearing accelerometers—sensors that could detect movement—attached to their stomach, to train its neural network with 'ground truth' data on the person's sleeping postures.

Consequently, BodyCompass was found to be the most accurate as it predicted the correct body posture for more than 90 percent of the time when the gadget was trained on one week's worth of data.

A Promising Device for Treatment of Different Conditions

The study also found that aside from monitoring patients with epilepsy and Parkinson's disease, this sleep monitoring device could prove beneficial when it comes to treating patients susceptible to bedsores and sleep apnea as both disorders can be eased by changing the sleeping posture.

According to Yue, he also had personal interest in the device, as he has migraines that appear to be affected by his sleeping behavior. He sleeps on his right side to get rid of a headache the following day. However, he is yet to be sure if there is indeed a correlation between migraines and sleep positions.

He now hopes that this device could help him determine if such a relationship exists. To date, BodyCompass is considered a monitoring device, although it may be partnered later on with an alert that can nudge a sleeper to change his position.

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