Design of A Robust Noncontact Vital Signs (NCVS) Monitoring System Using Software defined radio (SDR)

A Doppler-based robust non-contact vital signs (NCVS) sensor system designed using a commercial software defined radio (SDR) box with LabView programming is reported in this work. The NCVS sensing system is designed to operate at the 2.4 GHz ISM band and with optimized transmit/receive settings on gain, filtering, intermediate frequency (IF), antenna placement, etc. We will describe the system GUI (graphic user interface) and the basic software and hardware design considerations and setup for this SDR-enable NCVS system. Our measurement data demonstrates that it can continuously monitor the real-time respiration rate (RR) and heart rate (HR) of student volunteers sitting in a chair 1.3 meters away consistently within 0.5/3 BPM (breath/beat per minute) compared with the reference RR/HR signals, respectively.