Short-range noncontact sensors are capable of remotely detecting the precise movements of the subjects or wirelessly estimating the distance from the sensor to the subject. They find wide ...applications in our day lives such as noncontact vital sign detection of heart beat and respiration, sleep monitoring, occupancy sensing, and gesture sensing. In recent years, short-range noncontact sensors are attracting more and more efforts from both academia and industry due to their vast applications. Compared to other radar architectures such as pulse radar and frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar, Doppler radar is gaining more popularity in terms of system integration and low-power operation. This paper reviews the recent technical advances in Doppler radars for healthcare applications, including system hardware improvement, digital signal processing, and chip integration. This paper also discusses the hybrid FMCW-interferometry radars and the emerging applications and the future trends.
This paper presents a hybrid radar system that incorporates a linear frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) mode and an interferometry mode for indoor human localization and life activity ...monitoring applications. The unique operating principle and signal processing method allow the radar to work at two different modes for different purposes. The FMCW mode is responsible for range detection while the interferometry mode is responsible for life activities (respiration, heart beat, body motion, and gesture) monitoring. Such cooperation is built on each mode's own strength. Beam scanning is employed to determine azimuth information, which enables the system to plot 360° 2-D maps on which the room layout and objects' location can be clearly identified. Additionally, the transmitted chirp signal is coherent in phase, which is very sensitive to physiological motion and allows the proposed technique to distinguish human from nearby stationary clutters even when the human subjects are sitting still. Hence, the proposed radar is able to continuously track the location of individuals and monitor their life activities regardless of the complex indoor environment. A series of experiments have been carried out to demonstrate the proposed versatile life activity monitoring system.
Human respiratory patterns at chest and abdomen are associated with both physical and emotional states. Accurate measurement of the respiratory patterns provides an approach to assess and analyze the ...physical and emotional states of the subject persons. Not many research efforts have been made to wirelessly assess different respiration patterns, largely due to the inaccuracy of the conventional continuous-wave radar sensor to track the original signal pattern of slow respiratory movements. This paper presents the accurate assessment of different respiratory patterns based on noncontact Doppler radar sensing. This paper evaluates the feasibility of accurately monitoring different human respiration patterns via noncontact radar sensing. A 2.4 GHz DC coupled multi-radar system was used for accurate measurement of the complete respiration patterns without any signal distortion. Experiments were carried out in the lab environment to measure the different respiration patterns when the subject person performed natural breathing, chest breathing and diaphragmatic breathing. The experimental results showed that accurate assessment of different respiration patterns is feasible using the proposed noncontact radar sensing technique.
Owing to the low complexity and high level of system integration, the quadrature direct-conversion architecture is widely used in Doppler radar for noncontact detection of slow periodic motions such ...as mechanical vibrations and physiological motions of respiration and heartbeat. However, precise detection of the complete motion pattern has been challenging due to the high-pass characteristics of the ac-coupled baseband circuitry. A few techniques have been proposed to preserve the actual motion pattern in radar sensing based on hardware modifications that add system complexity and cost. In this paper, a digital post-distortion (DPoD) technique is proposed to compensate for the signal distortions in the digital baseband domain. Without any cumbersome hardware modification, the complete pattern of slow periodic motions can be detected using a simple quadrature direct-conversion architecture with ac-coupled baseband. Experimental results show that the proposed Doppler radar with the DPoD technique is robust to compensate signal distortions and can be used for precise detection of slow Doppler motions (near dc) where ac coupling typically attenuates the signal.
This paper presents a Doppler radar vital sign detection system with random body movement cancellation (RBMC) technique based on adaptive phase compensation. An ordinary camera was integrated with ...the system to measure the subject's random body movement (RBM) that is fed back as phase information to the radar system for RBMC. The linearity of the radar system, which is strictly related to the circuit saturation problem in noncontact vital sign detection, has been thoroughly analyzed and discussed. It shows that larger body movement does not necessarily mean larger radar baseband output. High gain configuration at baseband is required for acceptable SNR in noncontact vital sign detection. The phase compensation at radar RF front-end helps to relieve the high-gain baseband from potential saturation in the presence of large body movement. A simple video processing algorithm was presented to extract the RBM without using any marker. Both theoretical analysis and simulation have been carried out to validate the linearity analysis and the proposed RBMC technique. Two experiments were carried out in the lab environment. One is the phase compensation at RF front end to extract a phantom motion in the presence of another large shaker motion, and the other one is to measure the subject person breathing normally but randomly moving his body back and forth. The experimental results show that the proposed radar system is effective to relieve the linearity burden of the baseband circuit and help compensate the RBM.
This paper focuses on the exploitation of linear-frequency-modulated continuous-wave (LFMCW) radars for noncontact range tracking of vital signs, e.g., respiration. Such short-range system combines ...hardware simplicity and tracking precision, thus outperforming other remote-sensing approaches in the addressed biomedical scenario. A rigorous mathematical analysis of the operating principle of the LFMCW radar in the context of vital-sign monitoring, which includes the explanation of key aspects for the maintenance of coherence, is detailed. A precise phase-based range-tracking algorithm is also presented. Exhaustive simulations are carried out to confirm the suitability and robustness against clutter, noise, and multiple scatterers of the proposed radar architecture, which is subsequently implemented at the prototype level. Moreover, live data from real experiments associated to a metal plate and breathing subjects are obtained and studied.
In this paper, a miniaturized circularly polarized (CP) continuous wave Doppler radar system operating at 2.4 GHz is presented. The radar front end consists of one left-handed CP (LHCP) antenna and ...one right-handed CP (RHCP) antenna, which share a single patch antenna aperture. Orthogonal polarization is achieved through a modified ring-shaped quadrature hybrid coupler (QHC), and the resulting isolation between the two CP antennas is better than 30 dB. With 0 dBm input power to the transmitting antenna, the proposed radar system can accurately detect heartbeat and respiration movements of human test subjects under 1 m and over a wide angular range. The single dual CP antenna achieves 280% size reduction compared to a traditional two linear polarization patch antenna array with the same isolation level.
This article presents a spatial-temporal single harmonic switching (STHS) transmitter array architecture with enhanced efficiency in the power back-off (PBO) region. STHS is an electromagnetic ...circuit co-designed and jointly optimized transmitter array that realizes beamforming and back-off power generation at the same time. The temporal dimension is originally added in STHS to achieve back-off efficiency enhancement, which can be combined with conventional PBO enhancement methods such as Doherty amplifiers and envelope tracking. The design is validated through a simulation of a two-stage power amplifier (PA) in 65-nm CMOS at 77 GHz, which achieves a peak drain efficiency (DE) of 24.2%, a 22% DE at 3 dB PBO, 16% DE at 6 dB PBO, and 10.2% at 9 dB PBO. The efficiency exhibits a 57% improvement at 3 dB PBO, 100% improvement at 6 dB PBO, and 190% improvement at 9 dB PBO compared with class A/B amplifiers.
This paper introduces a strategy for automatically selecting dc offset calibration methods on a 2.4-GHz continuous wave (CW) radar sensor, which measures displacement for the purpose of structural ...health monitoring. Obtaining accurate displacement measurements using CW radar requires the successful application of dc offset calibration. This article compares four commonly applied dc offset calibration methods with a focus on each of the methods' accuracy and efficiency for different measurement signal characteristics. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the accuracy of each method. An advanced systematic strategy for selecting the most appropriate method based on signal characteristics is developed. The automated selection strategy is implemented in software and validated on experimental data.
Quality of sleep is an important indicator of health and well being. Recent developments in the field of in-home sleep monitoring have the potential to enhance a person's sleeping experience and ...contribute to an overall sense of well being. Existing in-home sleep monitoring devices either fail to provide adequate sleep information or are obtrusive to use. To overcome these obstacles, a noncontact and cost-effective sleep monitoring system, named SleepSense, is proposed for continuous recognition of the sleep status, including on-bed movement, bed exit, and breathing section. SleepSense consists of three parts: a Doppler radar-based sensor, a robust automated radar demodulation module, and a sleep status recognition framework. Herein, several time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted for the sleep recognition framework. A prototype of SleepSense is presented and evaluated using two sets of experiments. In the short-term controlled experiment, the SleepSense achieves an overall 95.1% accuracy rate in identifying various sleep status. In the 75-minute sleep study, SleepSense demonstrates wide usability in real life. The error rate for breathing rate extraction in this study is only 6.65%. These experimental results indicate that SleepSense is an effective and promising solution for in-home sleep monitoring.
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