Monitoring heart activity using ultra-wideband radar

Abstract

This Letter focuses on extracting the heartbeat information using ultra-wideband impulse radar, and a new method that can extract not only the heart rate but also the timing of the heartbeat with high accuracy is proposed herein. As the first step towards achieving this goal, radar pulses are projected towards a human body, and the reflected pulses are accumulated along the time axis at specific time intervals. The accumulated pulses pass through a digital filter to reveal the heartbeat information and are converted to a greyscale image. A pattern that reflects the heartbeats is used as a template to find similar patterns in the entire image. After all the significant patterns are found, the timing information corresponding to the locations where the patterns appear is calculated, and this indicates the time when the heartbeats actually occur. From the experimental results, the authors confirmed that the proposed method could estimate the heart rate with high accuracy and extract the timing information of the heartbeats.