Imagine measuring your heart rate without wearing a smartwatch or chest strap. This future may not be far off.
Engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a system that uses Wi-Fi signals to monitor heart rate without the need for smart watches, chest straps or other wearable devices. The project called Pulse-Fi is in first date that common wireless devices can be reused as accurate health sensors.
“Contactless monitoring of vital signs, such as heart rate, is critical to improving elderly care and early medical intervention,” the study said. “Healthcare and long-term care increasingly require consistent, continuous accuracy that is easy to implement. Wi-Fi signals offer unique advantages: they pass through walls, are ubiquitous indoors, and avoid privacy issues related to cameras.”
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What is PulseFi?
Pulse-Fi takes advantage of the way Wi-Fi signals communicate with the body. Each time a signal passes, the heartbeat creates subtle waves that change the waveform slightly. The system can detect these minor disturbances by setting up a transmitter to send the signal and a receiver to receive the signals on the other side. From there, a machine learning model trained with data from more than a hundred volunteers in different positions filters out the noise and identifies variations associated with heart rate.
What makes this approach so attractive is its simplicity. The researchers showed that even cheap hardware, like a $30 Raspberry Pi or a $5 ESP32 Wi-Fi module, is powerful enough to run the system. In tests, the Pulse-Fi was able to measure heart rate by half a beat per minute after just five seconds. It remained clinically accurate whether participants were sitting, standing or lying down and working at a distance of up to three meters.
The impact of this research could be significant. Wearable devices and hospital monitors provide reliable heart rate measurements, but are often expensive or impractical. Pulse-Fi is based on hardware that costs less than $30, making it practical for homes, clinics and institutions with limited resources. Since the process is completely contactless, it can be especially useful for the elderly, patients in recovery or people who do not like or tolerate the use of sensors.
The research team is already expanding the system to measure breathing and is investigating applications for conditions such as sleep apnea. In the long term, the technology could turn home Wi-Fi setups into passive health monitors, providing continuous feedback without people having to change their routines.
Pulse-Fi was presented at the International Conference on Distributed Computing in Intelligent Systems and the Internet of Things 2025 in Tuscany, Italy. What began as a university project points to a future where our homes will be equipped with invisible health sensors, powered not by expensive devices, but by the WiFi we already use every day.
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