Non-Invasive Contactless Tracking of Respiratory Rate and Heart Rate During Sleep

TL;DR

A new smart bedsheet tracks heart and breathing rates during sleep with high accuracy, offering a non-invasive alternative to traditional methods.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel preprocessing pipeline for cardiorespiratory tracking using a sensor-equipped bedsheet.

Findings

Respiratory rate was estimated with 93.9% accuracy using zero-crossing and peak detection methods.

Heart rate estimation reached 88.7% accuracy but decreased in lateral sleep positions or at low BPM.

The Smart Bedding® system showed consistent performance across sleeping positions and frequency ranges for respiration.

Abstract

Heart and respiratory rate monitoring during sleep enables the detection of physiological irregularities through contact or contactless methods. Traditional approaches like polysomnography are accurate but costly, ergonomically limited, and often poorly accepted by patients. Smart Bedding® is a novel, flexible bedsheet equipped with a high-resolution sensor network that records movement, pressure, sound, temperature, and humidity throughout the night. This study aimed to estimate cardiorespiratory parameters using the Smart Bedding® IMU. Data from 30 participants sleeping on Smart Bedding® while undergoing simultaneous polysomnography were analyzed. A robust and low-cost preprocessing pipeline was developed; estimation was performed using zero-crossing, peak detection, and Burg’s method for comparison, and validation was conducted using polysomnography as the gold-standard reference. Respiratory and heart rates were accurately estimated, achieving overall accuracies of 93.9% and 88.7% using zero-crossing and peak detection, respectively. Respiratory rate estimation showed no significant limitations across the frequency spectrum or among sleeping positions. However, heart rate estimation accuracy decreased when the frequency was below 55 BPM or when participants slept in a lateral sleep position, likely due to reduced cardiac signal power. Overall, the proposed methodology accurately tracked respiratory and cardiac patterns throughout the night, supporting Smart Bedding® as a promising tool for future sleep tracking applications.

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