Objective Sleep monitoring is an important issue in health care area. In a conventional system, users have to wear a lot of sensors, which may significantly affect their quality of sleep. So it is significant to develop a non-contact and low-cost sleep monitoring system. Methods In this study, based on an IP camera, we realize a non-contact and low-cost sleep monitoring system launched on the platform of a mobile phone. Using the camera as a video server, mobile phones at the user end can access data by logging to the address of the server and then perform further health care analysis. With the software developed at the mobile phone terminal, one can detect the user’s multiple physiological information such as sleeping posture, breath frequency, turn over times, snoring etc. Results The practicability of this system is demonstrated by a series of experiments, such as recording a user’s all night long sleeping video, detecting the breath signals and snoring signals. Conclusions This system supplies an approach of non-contact and low-cost sleep research