Heartbeat And Respiration Detection Using A Low Complexity Cw Radar System

Cardiopulmonary monitoring mainly relies on electrodes in contact with the skin. This can be challenging in cases of patients with compromised skin, premature babies or in assisted living applications where the elderly may remove their sensors. Hence, it is of high importance to be able to detect human vital signs in a contactless and non-intrusive manner. Methods such as the use of cameras do not protect the privacy of a patient. This work presents the theory and optimized implementation of an alternative method, a continuous wave (CW) radar sensor system, that successfully detects the heartbeat and respiration of a person from a distance of 1 m. The proposed implementation allows for the first time, to improve the quality of the detected signal by cancelling undesired DC components, detrimental to heartbeat detection via manual analog tuning.