Wireless Healthcare System for Life Detection and Vital Sign Monitoring

Non-contact human sensing based on radar has attracted numerous attentions and been applied in various applications, such as localization, vital sign monitoring and activity identification. This paper presents a wireless healthcare system to achieve life detection and vital sign monitoring based on frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar. Most of previous methods have studied to detect moving targets. The proposed life detection method has achieved stationary human target detection by utilizing the inherent characteristics of human breathing motion: spatial correlation and periodicity. Based on the phase sensitivity of FMCW radar, breathing motion is monitored within the range provided by the life detection step. Besides, different algorithms are adopted for different detection range to remove the distance and environment impacts. Experiments are carried out and have demonstrated that the proposed method can detect the stationary human targets accurately and 95% of the breathing rate estimation error is less than 3 BPM(Beat Per Minute).