Design and Measurements of mmWave FMCW Radar Based Non-Contact Multi-Patient Heart Rate and Breath Rate Monitoring System

TL;DR

This paper presents a non-contact mmWave FMCW radar system capable of simultaneously monitoring heart and breath rates of multiple patients with high accuracy, utilizing a novel processing approach for improved measurement reliability.

Contribution

The work introduces a new multi-patient HR and BR monitoring system using FMCW radar with a least squares based processing method for enhanced accuracy and generalization.

Findings

Achieved over 97% accuracy in breath rate measurement.

Achieved over 93% accuracy in heart rate measurement.

Demonstrated effective multi-patient monitoring with experimental validation.

Abstract

Recent developments in mmWave radar technologies have enabled the truly non-contact heart-rate (HR) and breath-rate (BR) measurement approaches, which provides a great ease in patient monitoring. Additionally, these technologies also provide opportunities to simultaneously detect HR and BR of multiple patients, which has become increasingly important for efficient mass monitoring scenarios. In this work, a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) mmWave radar based truly non-contact multiple patient HR and BR monitoring system has been presented. Furthermore, a novel approach is also proposed, which combines multiple processing methods using a least squares solution to improve measurement accuracy, generalization, and handle measurement error. The proposed system has been developed using Texas Instruments' FMCW radar and experimental results with multiple subjects are also presented, which show >97% and >93% accuracy in the measured BR and HR values, respectively.