Passive and Context-Aware In-Home Vital Signs Monitoring Using Co-Located UWB-Depth Sensor Fusion

Basic vital signs such as heart and respiratory rates (HR and RR) are essential bio-indicators. Their longitudinal in-home collection enables prediction and detection of disease onset and change, providing for earlier health intervention. In this article, we propose a robust, non-touch vital signs monitoring system using a pair of co-located Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) and depth sensors. By extensive manual examination, we identify four typical temporal and spectral signal patterns and their suitable vital sign estimators. We devise a probabilistic weighted framework (PWF) that quantifies evidence of these patterns to update the weighted combination of estimator output to track the vital signs robustly. We also design a “heatmap”-based signal quality detector to exclude the disturbed signal from inadvertent motions. To monitor multiple co-habiting subjects in-home, we build a two-branch long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to distinguish between individuals and their activities, providing activity context crucial to disambiguating critical from normal vital sign variability. To achieve reliable context annotation, we carefully devise the feature set of the consecutive skeletal poses from the depth data, and develop a probabilistic tracking model to tackle non-line-of-sight (NLOS) cases. Our experimental results demonstrate the robustness and superior performance of the individual modules as well as the end-to-end system for passive and context-aware vital sign monitoring.