Smartphones may soon be able to monitor your breathing during sleep

Researchers say they have come up with an accurate and simple way to monitor breathing during sleep, without the need for wearable devices.

It's a pair of headphones with a built-in microphone and a smartphone on your bedside table . The technology promises to make it easier to track sleep disorders, eliminating the need for patients to visit a sleep lab.

The team from Stevens Institute of Technology and Florida State University conducted a six-month study: headphones with built-in microphones were plugged into iPhones and then recorded the sounds of six people sleeping. The researchers said that even if the headphones were placed on the bedside table, the microphones were able to accurately monitor the participants' breathing.

Yingying Chen, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, said they plan to launch a smartphone app related to the research next year.

Such an app could make it easier and cheaper to accurately monitor sleep quality than sensor-based wristbands or devices that sit on or under your mattress. While consumer wearable activity trackers have improved dramatically and proliferated, they are uncomfortable to use and have variable accuracy.

Chen also hopes that their research can help diagnose health problems such as sleep apnea. Usually, this problem is diagnosed in a hospital, where sensors are attached to the patient and professional medical staff monitor their sleep. In this environment, Chen points out, it is difficult for doctors to catch patients' irregularities.

The researchers tested the sensitivity of earphone microphones to record breathing rates and modified the earphones with additional microphones to record in both mono and stereo. They filtered out ambient noise to focus on the sounds of breathing and other movements that occur during sleep, such as snoring and coughing.

Andrew Campbell, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College, called the research "cool" but noted that measuring breathing signals can be difficult when more than one person sleeps in the same bed.

This problem may be solved because many mobile phones now have several microphones built in to help cancel noise. "It would be great if the microphones on the phone could be improved to be able to do this kind of sensing without headphones."

The paper on the above technology will be officially published at the IEEE Infocom conference in April next year.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.