Non-contact monitoring of human heartbeat signals using mm-wave frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions

Abstract

Radar has been shown potentially to be used for non-contact sensing of biosignals in a more comfortable and easier way than wearable and contact devices. By detecting and extracting body motions linked to physiological activities, accurate estimation of the heart rate is possible. However, the detection and estimation of heartbeat signal in practical applications is disturbed seriously by noise and respiration harmonic signal. In this study, a multi-level coarse-to-fine method is proposed for heartbeat rate (HR) estimation with a frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar operating at 60 GHz utilised to extract the heartbeat information of human body under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. First, the frequencies, which are likely to be the HR, are extracted in the coarse estimation part. Then, evaluations about the extracted frequencies are conducted in the fine estimation part. Finally, the multiple signal classification algorithm is utilised to separate the HR frequency from the respiration harmonics, which solves the frequency resolution issue caused by the observation window size, and achieves high accuracy estimation of HR. The experiments on measured data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the state of the art, the proposed method has superiority in terms of estimation accuracy of HR.