Vital sign localization and measurement using an LFMCW MIMO radar

Non-contact vital sign monitoring offers several advantages over contact based methods in particular regarding user-friendliness. Measurements relying on the radar principle differentiate from other contactless techniques in its robustness. In order to allow convenient assessment of cardiopulmonary activity a separation of the respiratory and cardiac components in the time domain is useful as shown by means of a signal model. A signal processing method to achieve this is developed by utilizing the empirical mode decomposition. Experiments were carried out to verify the proposed technique. Comparing the processed radar results with measurements of a gold standard reference, a successful heart rate estimation is demonstrated.