White noise monitors infant breathing as it soothes

Known as BreathJunior, it works by measuring the reflected white noise signal that’s bounced off an infant’s chest as it sleeps. It was developed in line with the hardware used in Amazon’s Echo smart speaker. According to the research, which will be presented at the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, the system can  closely match the respiratory rates detected by standard vital sign monitors.

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"We start out by transmitting a random white noise signal. But we are generating this random signal, so we know exactly what the randomness is," said first author Anran Wang, a doctoral student at the university’s Paul Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

"That signal goes out and reflects off the baby. Then the smart speaker's microphones get a random signal back. Because we know the original signal, we can cancel out any randomness from that and then we're left with only information about the motion from the baby."