Contactless Respiration and Heartbeat Monitoring of Multiple People Using a 2-D Imaging Radar

Non-contact vital sign monitoring of multiple people can be realized using a radar sensor that is able to provide a high resolution two-dimensional image of the monitored area. This is particularly user-friendly, since no electrodes have to be attached to the body, which is important especially in view of applications like monitoring neonates or burn victims. There are many further applications of remote cardiopulmonary monitoring in the area of home health care, driver monitoring, sleep monitoring, or even monitoring of arrested people in a prison cell. The radar is able to measure the tiny movements of the chest, caused by respiration and heartbeat. Due to the superposition of both movements a sophisticated processing of the measured data is necessary to extract the heartbeat and respiration signal from the measured overall signal. This paper presents radar measurements at 24 and 77 GHz, where vital signs of multiple people have been simultaneously monitored and proposes a signal processing method to separate heartbeat and respiration in the measured data.