Pre-Conference Talk by HU Changshuo | BreathPro: Monitoring Breathing Mode during Running with Earables

Running is a popular and accessible form of aerobic exercise, significantly benefiting our health and wellness. By monitoring a range of running parameters with wearable devices, runners can gain a deep understanding of their running behavior, facilitating performance improvement in future runs. Among these parameters, breathing, which fuels our bodies with oxygen and expels carbon dioxide, is crucial to improving the efficiency of running. While previous studies have made substantial progress in measuring breathing rate, exploration of additional breathing monitoring during running is still lacking. In this work, we fill this gap by presenting BreathPro, the first breathing mode monitoring system for running. It leverages the in-ear microphone on earables to record breathing sounds and combines the out-ear microphone on the same device to mitigate external noises, thereby enhancing the clarity of in-ear breathing sounds. BreathPro incorporates a suite of well-designed signal processing and machine learning techniques to enable breathing mode detection with superior accuracy. We implemented BreathPro as a smartphone application and demonstrated its energy-efficient and real-time execution. 

This is a Pre-Conference talk for The 2024 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp / ISWC 2024).
 

HU Changshuo is a first-year PhD student at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, under the supervision of Assistant Professor Dong MA. His research focuses on mobile computing and pervasive sensing, with a particular emphasis on acoustic earable systems. These systems enable ubiquitous applications, such as fine-grained behavior monitoring and passive, lightweight user authentication.