Seismocardiography-Inspired Heart Activity Monitoring Using FMCW Radar

Accurate and continuous heart rate monitoring is crucial for numerous healthcare applications. This study introduces an effective method that uses Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar to non-invasively capture heartbeat information. Inspired by seismocardiography, a signal processing pipeline is proposed that includes heart range identification, chest displacement extraction, acceleration derivation, and heartbeat reconstruction. Key cardiac events, such as aortic valve opening and closing, are precisely detected using peak identification techniques. The proposed approach demonstrates strong performance in isolating individual heartbeats. The effectiveness of the reconstructed heartbeat signal is evaluated by comparing inter-beat intervals and heart rate against a gold standard. Results show accurate heartbeat extraction and fiducial point detection, achieving a mean absolute error of 44ms for inter-beat intervals and 1.75bpm for heart rate. Our findings indicate that FMCW radar is a viable alternative for remote and continuous cardiac monitoring.