Non-contact Cardio-respiratory Monitoring of Preterm Infants in NICU: RGB Camera or mmWave FMCW radar?

The cardio-respiratory monitoring of premature infants is essential in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Non-contact cardio-respiratory monitoring based on cameras or millimeter Wave (mmWave) Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar is particularly advantageous for long-term monitoring of preterm infants due to its unobtrusive nature. Most studies compared the performance of camera and mmWave FMCW radar in respiratory rate and heart rate monitoring under ideal laboratory conditions with adult data. However, their performance comparison in clinical environments (e.g. NICU) remains unknown. To our best knowledge, we conducted the first clinical study in comparing an RGB camera and mmWave FMCW radar for infant cardio-respiratory monitoring in NICU, involving 16 premature infants in various conditions (e.g., active or quiet, rapid or slow breathing). The experimental results show that both the camera and radar based on the micro-displacement measurement of chest have similar performance for respiratory rate monitoring. For heart rate monitoring, camera-based blood pulsation measurement is clearly more robust than radar-based micro-motion measurement of heart contractionClinical relevance-Cardio-respiratory Monitoring, Heart rate, Respiratory rate, Camera, mmWave FMCW Radar, NICU.