Experimental Evaluation of the Effects of Antenna Radiation Characteristics on Heart Rate Monitoring Radar Systems

TL;DR

This study experimentally evaluates how different antenna radiation characteristics affect the performance of 2.4 GHz Doppler radar systems used for non-contact heart rate monitoring, identifying optimal antenna configurations.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on antenna configurations that enhance radar-based heart rate detection accuracy, including validation on human subjects.

Findings

Circularly polarized receiver antennas improve signal quality.

Optimal antenna arrangement increases detection accuracy by 11%.

Experimental results guide antenna design for better health monitoring systems.

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study to evaluate the effects of antenna radiation parameters on the detection capabilities of a 2.4 GHz Doppler radar used in non-contact heart rate monitoring systems. Four different types of patch antennas and array configurations were implemented on both the transmitter and receiver sides. Extensive experiments using a linear actuator were performed and several interesting and nontrivial results were reported. It is shown that using a linearly polarized single patch antenna at the transmitter and a circularly polarized antenna array at the receiver results in the highest signal quality and system performance. Proof-of-concept experiments on human subjects further validated the suggested results. It was also shown that using the recommended antenna arrangement will boost the heart rate detection accuracy of the radar by an average of 11%.