Imagine checking your heart rhythm without strapping a smartwatch or Chest monitor. This future may not be far away.
Engineers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a system that uses Wi-Fi signals to monitor heart rate without the need for a smartwatch, chest strap or other wearable devices. The project is called pulse-fi, displayed in Early data Ordinary wireless devices can be reused as accurate health sensors.
“Invasive monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate is critical to improving elderly care and early health interventions,” the study said. “Long-term care and healthcare facilities are increasingly in need of easy-to-deploy systems, continuous accuracy. Wi-Fi signals have unique advantages: they penetrate walls, ubiquitous indoors and avoid camera-based privacy issues.”
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What is Pulse-fi?
Pulse-Fi works by leveraging the advantages of Wi-Fi signals interacting with the body. Each time the signal passes, the heartbeat creates subtle ripples, which slightly changes the waves. The system can capture these tiny interference by setting the transmitter to send signals and receivers to collect content on the other side. From there, a machine learning model that trains data from over a hundred volunteers to filter noise and pinpoint changes related to pulses.
What makes this method so compelling is its simplicity. Researchers show that even cheap hardware, such as the $30 Raspberry Pi or the $5 ESP32 Wi-Fi module, is powerful enough to run the system. In the test, Pulse-Fi can read the heart rate at just half a beat every minute after only five seconds. Whether the participants sat, stood or lie down, it remained clinically accurate and worked at a distance of up to three meters.
The implications of this study may be important. Wearable devices and hospital monitors provide reliable heart rate readings, but are often expensive or inconvenient. Pulse-Fi relies on hardware that costs under $30, which is practical for homes, clinics, and low-resource settings. Since the process is completely contactless, it can be especially useful for older people, recovered patients, or people who don’t like or can’t stand wearing sensors.
The research team is already expanding the system to measure breathing and explore applications of diseases such as sleep apnea. In the long run, the technology can turn a home Wi-Fi setup into a passive health monitor, providing continuous feedback without people changing routines.
Pulse-Fi was presented at the International Conference on Distributed Computing at the Smart Systems and IoT Conference in Tuscany, Italy in 2025. At the moment when we started with the university project, it is a future where our homes are equipped with invisible health sensors, rather than powered by expensive gadgets, but the Wi-Fi we already use every day.
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