Systematic Heartbeat Monitoring using a FMCW mm-Wave Radar

Abstract

Radar health monitoring system has been demonstrated superiority in noncontact monitoring of vital signs. However, the heartbeat extraction from radar signal is heavily affected by respiratory interference. For the sake of heartbeat reconstruction accuracy, we propose here a real time systematic heart beat monitoring method using Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave (FMCW) mm-wave radar, referred to as SHB. The SHB consists of two major steps. In the enhancement step, the differential operation is applied to FMCW phase variation signal to enhance heartbeat components and harmonics, and band pass filter is used to eliminate the respiration interference. Then in the heartbeat waveform reconstruction step, the heartbeat reconstruction from its harmonics formula is proposed. Finally, a Kalman filter is used to further improve heartbeat waveform quality. The preliminary experimental results have shown the estimated error is 1.97%-4.26%.