Non-Contact Heart-Rate Measurement Method Using Both Transmitted Wave Extraction and Wavelet Transform

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Devices
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Continuous heart-rate monitoring is crucial for early detection of physical discomfort.
• Existing methods often struggle with accuracy in the presence of body movement.
• Non-contact monitoring is desirable for applications like driver monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel non-contact heart-rate measurement method.
• To enable accurate heart-rate monitoring during body movement.
• To investigate the use of transmitted electric field strength changes for heart-rate detection.

Main Methods:

• Utilized microwaves irradiated through the human body to capture internal changes.
• Employed three receiving sensors to estimate electric field strength transmitted through the heart.
• Applied stationary wavelet transform to decompose the electric field and mitigate body movement distortion.

Main Results:

• Successfully estimated electric field strength changes correlated with cardiac diastole and systole.
• Achieved a high heart-rate estimation accuracy of 98% in verification experiments.
• Demonstrated robustness against normal body movement effects.

Conclusions:

• The proposed non-contact microwave-based method offers a promising solution for accurate heart-rate monitoring.
• This technique effectively reduces motion artifacts, making it suitable for dynamic environments.
• The findings support the potential for advanced driver monitoring systems and other applications requiring continuous, movement-tolerant heart-rate tracking.