Joint Ranging and Respiration Rate Monitoring for Moving Targets Using COTS IR-UWB Hardware

This paper explores the use of a commercial-off-the-shelf impulse-radio ultra-wideband transceiver with 0.5 GHz bandwidth for ranging and respiration rate monitoring of a moving target. Respiration causes the chest to change in shape, which alters the target’s radar cross section, which causes periodical changes in the channel impulse response. A median filter, Viterbi algorithm and a particle filter are used to determine the range of the target, band-pass filtering and fourier transforming are used for respiration rate estimation. The results demonstrate that accurate localization and respiration rate monitoring is possible under controlled settings, but not in a realistic scenario.