Latest Development on Non-Contact Vital Signs (NCVS) Sensor Systems Using Software Defined Radio (SDR)

Having an intelligible and robust sensor system that can monitor the key vital signs of patients (i.e., respiration rates and heart rates) remotely and continuously may save patients’ lives. The recent development of robust radio-frequency (RF) non-contact vital signs (NCVS) sensor systems enabled by the software-defined-radio (SDR) technology capable of continuously monitoring the respiration rate (RR) and heart rate (HR) of human subjects >~ 1 meter away will be discussed in this paper. SDR-based NCVS sensor systems developed in our labs are realized using a commercially available SDR box and operating at the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The NCVS monitoring system achieved impressive real-time RR/HR monitoring accuracies within ~ 0.5/3 BPM (breath/beat per minute), respectively, on volunteers over many sessions. The monitoring accuracy is dependent on settings on SDR transmit/receive gain, filters, intermediate frequency (IF), and subject’s posture. We have obtained an IRB (Internal Review Board) approval to start clinical testing on actual patients at the Physicians’ Clinics of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). We will provide a short survey on latest industry products in this area in the end.