Remote monitoring of vital signs using a CMOS UWB radar transceiver

This paper presents a fully CMOS integrated Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (IR-UWB) based radar transceiver applied in remote respiration- and heart-rate monitoring. The combination of high bandwidth and direct RF sampling offers fine spatial resolution and accuracy along with flexibility in the application-level signal processing. The high-speed RF sampling is enabled by a time-interleaved Analog-to-Digital Converter relying on the inherent coherency of radar TX/RX. The topology is based on Continuous Time Binary Valued (CTBV) signal processing moving design constraints from the amplitude domain to the time domain adapting to the very short time-constants offered by modern CMOS technology. The primary focus of this paper is to explore the use of UWB radar technology in health and medical applications, where the offered combination of high resolution and penetration abilities is a major advantage. In addition to covering the actual radar sensor, embedded signal processing based on Pulse-Doppler time-frequency analysis is utilized in a fully self-contained radar module. Measured results of vital signs in different scenarios are presented and discussed.