Event Recognition for Contactless Activity Monitoring Using Phase-Modulated Continuous Wave Radar

The use of remote sensing technologies such as radar is gaining popularity as a technique for contactless detection of physiological signals and analysis of human motion. This paper presents a methodology for classifying different events in a collection of phase modulated continuous wave radar returns. The primary application of interest is to monitor inmates where the presence of human vital signs amidst different, interferences needs to be identified.

A comprehensive set of features is derived through time and frequency domain analyses of the radar returns. The Bhattacharyya distance is used to preselect the features with highest class separability as the possible candidate features for use in the classification process. The uncorrelated linear discriminant analysis is performed to decorrelate, denoise, and reduce the dimension of the candidate feature set. Linear and quadratic Bayesian classifiers are designed to distinguish breathing, different human motions, and nonhuman motions. The performance of these classifiers is evaluated on a pilot dataset of radar returns that contained different events including breathing, stopped breathing, simple human motions, and movement of fan and water.

Our proposed pattern classification system achieved accuracies of up to 93% in stationary subject detection, 90% in stop-breathing detection, and 86% in interference detection.

Our proposed radar pattern recognition system was able to accurately distinguish the predefined events amidst interferences.

Besides inmate monitoring and suicide attempt detection, this paper can be extended to other radar applications such as home-based monitoring of elderly people, apnea detection, and home occupancy detection.