Design issues in vital sign monitoring through IR UWB radar

Measurement of respiration and heartbeat rate through IR UWB radar has been discussed; the main issues related to the extraction of heartbeat signal from the received signal are also described. An algorithm for estimation of heartbeat frequency from the received signal has been proposed. A notch filter bank is used to find the maximum peak frequencies in the observation frequency range of about 1Hz to 3 Hz. The heart rate may be estimated even if its magnitude is not the maximum in the specified range of frequencies. The main contribution of this paper is to differentiate the heart rate from the closely located respiration harmonics by adjusting the frequency resolution and notch filter bandwidth.