A Digital-Enhanced Interferometric Radar Sensor for Physiological Sign Monitoring

A conceptual digital-enhanced chip-scale radar sensor is proposed in the paper, where a novel quadrature interferometric phase analysis algorithm is proposed to be leveraged to enhance the performance of a radar system on monitoring tiny physiological signs. The radar sensor has the potential to achieve localization on target subject and monitoring of multi-modal physiological signs through the interferometric phase analysis method. In-phase and quadrature templates are adaptively generated and correlated with the de-chirped signal at the receiver to extract the micro physiological signs, which is realized with the help of FPGA. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology, the prototype radar frontend of the system can demonstrate 1 GHz chirp bandwidth at a 1.2-V supply. The conceptual configurable radar system illustrates its capability on detecting various kinds of physiological signs.