Vital Sign Monitoring with FMCW Radar

Overview

We estimated breathing and heart rates from frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar signals, using 3D beamforming to focus on specific parts of the body.

Method

• 3D Bartlett beamforming points the radar at different sections of the body so breathing and heartbeat signals can be separated.
• From each focused signal we extracted and unwrapped the phase to get the vital sign waveform.

Results

We tested the method on seven people. Compared with conventional 2D beamforming, 3D beamforming gave lower mean absolute error for both heart rate and breathing rate across our test scenarios.

I was second author on a paper about this work. We submitted it to an IEEE conference and it was rejected, but I still learned a lot from it about radar signal processing.