This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
In our daily life, inadvertent scratching may increase the severity of skin diseases (such asatopic dermatitis etc.). However, people rarely pay attention to this matter, so the knownmeasurement behaviour of the movement is also very little. Nevertheless, the behaviour and frequencyof scratching represent the degree of itching, and the analysis of scratching frequency is helpfulto the doctor's clinical dosage. In this Letter, a novel system is proposed to monitor thescratching motion of a sleeping human body at night. The core device of the system is just a leakycoaxial cable (LCX) and a router. Commonly, LCX is used in the blind field or semi-blindfield inwireless communication. The new idea is that the leaky cable is placed on the bed, and then thestate information of physical layer of wireless communication channels is acquired to identify thescratching motion and other small body movements in the human sleep process. The results show thatit can be used to detect the movement and its duration. Channel state information (CSI) packet iscollected by card installed in the computer based on the 802.11n protocol. The characterisation ofthe scratch motion in the collected CSI is unique, so it can be distinguished from the wirelesschannel amplitude variation trend.
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