Band-of-Interest-based Channel Impulse Response Fusion for Breathing Rate Estimation with UWB

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fusion method for multiple CIR delay bins to improve breathing rate estimation accuracy in UWB systems, especially in challenging scenarios with obstacles or target movement.

Contribution

It proposes a novel CIR delay bin fusion technique that enhances breathing rate estimation robustness over single-bin methods in complex environments.

Findings

Fusion method improves estimation accuracy in obstacle scenarios

Multiple CIR bins provide more reliable breathing rate estimates

Method outperforms single-bin approaches in diverse conditions

Abstract

The channel impulse response (CIR) obtained from the channel estimation step of various wireless systems is a widely used source of information in wireless sensing. Breathing rate is one of the important vital signs that can be retrieved from the CIR. Recently, there have been various works that extract the breathing rate from one carefully selected CIR delay bin that contains the breathing information. However, it has also been shown that the accuracy of this estimation is very sensitive to the measurement scenario, e.g., if there is any obstacle between the transceivers and the target, the position of the target, and the orientation of the target, since only one CIR delay bin does not contain a sufficient periodic component to retrieve the breathing rate. We focus on such scenarios and propose a CIR delay bin fusion method to merge several CIR bins to achieve a more accurate and reliable breathing rate estimate. We take measurements and showcase the advantages of the proposed method across scenarios.