Pre-clearance research prototype
ViFi is a Wi-Fi-based sensor on the wall that monitors hospital patients continuously, captures the transient abnormalities that intermittent nursing rounds miss, and never touches or disturbs the patient. Built for hospital med-surg and telemetry floors and skilled nursing facilities, where 2.3 million U.S. beds get vital-signs checks every 4 to 8 hours and are unmonitored more than 23 hours a day.
vs $3,000+ for a bedside monitor
no wires, no wearables, no compliance
vs every 4–8 hours by a nurse
real hardware, real subject
Why this exists
Outside the ICU — across 2.3 million U.S. hospital and skilled nursing facility beds — a nurse takes vital signs every 4 to 8 hours. The rest of the time, no one is watching. Sepsis spikes, post-surgical complications, opioid-induced breathing problems: most of them happen in those gaps and only get noticed at the next round.
Continuous monitoring exists, but it costs about $3,000 per bed and means strapping wires and electrodes to people who often pull them off. So hospitals reserve it for the ICU. The much larger floor of ordinary patients gets nothing.
I'm building ViFi because it's the platform I wish my mother had when she spent a month in the hospital with sepsis, where the monitoring equipment meant to keep her safe — wires, adhesives, blood-pressure cuffs, lights at 3 a.m. — were the very thing preventing her rest and recovery.
How it works
Two small chips in the room exchange WiFi signals back and forth. Every breath you take and every heartbeat slightly changes how those signals travel through the air. ViFi reads those changes as vital signs — no contact, no wearables, no line of sight required.
For full methodology, signal pipeline, and validation runs: read the results.
What's been shown
4.15 bpm cross-session HR error against a Polar H10 chest-strap reference, on a 2-chip array of $25 ESP32-S3 boards. PhaseBeat — the academic reference using $500 WiFi cards — reported 1.5 bpm. ViFi: 4.15 bpm on 20× cheaper hardware.
Full methodology, captures, and per-session breakdowns: read our results
| System | HR MAE | Hardware | Per-node cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| ViFi | 4.15 bpm | 2× ESP32-S3 | ~$22 |
| PhaseBeat | 1.5 bpm | 2× Intel 5300 NIC | ~$500 |
| Bedside monitor | ≤ 1 bpm | ECG / SpO₂ | ~$3,000 |
What's next
Today ViFi is a pre-clearance research prototype, not a medical device. From here, three steps stand between this and a contactless monitor running over a hospital bed:
Test ViFi on 10+ different people, in 3+ different rooms, against the same chest-strap reference. Goal: under 3 bpm error across subjects the system has never seen.
Install ViFi in 5–10 hospital rooms alongside the existing standard of care. Compare what ViFi sees with what the hospital sees. Patient data stays on-site and de-identified; no clinical decisions are made from ViFi during the pilot.
Run a clinical validation study at an academic medical center, compile the safety and accuracy data, file with the FDA. This is what makes ViFi legally usable for medical decisions in U.S. hospitals.
For hospitals
ViFi is in conversation with medical/surgical floor leaders, biomedical engineering teams, and clinical research offices interested in hosting a wellness-grade pilot of contactless monitoring.
A pilot looks like this:
Methodology and roadmap
ViFi's full real-hardware methodology and product roadmap are public. The engineering work — capture pipeline, training scripts, prediction service, calibration, audit log, and 102-test suite — is kept private during pre-clearance development. Available for technical review under NDA for investors, hospital partners, and prospective collaborators.