Description:Over the past two decades, radar technology has emerged as a promising solution for remote patient monitoring, offering significant advantages over traditional sensing methods. Radar systems enable long-term vital signs monitoring, including the measurement of respiration and heart rates, support medical diagnostics such as the detection of sleep apnea syndrome and arrhythmias, and facilitate rapid emergency detection, including heart attacks and falls. Notably, they achieve these capabilities in a non-invasive manner, without raising privacy concerns or causing adverse health effects. This makes radar an ideal choice for applications in healthcare, ambient assisted living, and smart monitoring environments. Additionally, radar’s ability to operate effectively under low-light, through-wall, and non-line-of-sight conditions broadens its applicability in diverse and challenging settings.
In this work, we present a novel signal processing technique for beam-steering radar architectures that enables the determination of the number of individuals in a room while concurrently performing vital signs monitoring and two-dimensional (2-D) localization of multiple subjects. The technique was demonstrated using a single-input single-output (SISO) frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system equipped with two frequency-scanning antennas (FSAs). Unlike traditional state-of-the-art solutions, the proposed approach effectively isolates the Doppler signal generated by each individual from environmental reflections, allowing for accurate determination of the number of occupants, precise measurement of vital signs (respiration and heart rates), and reliable estimation of 2-D positions (range and azimuth information).
Experimental validation underscores the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating its capability to accurately detect the number of individuals in a room, continuously monitor and track their vital signs with clinically acceptable accuracy, and achieve 2-D localization with errors well within the radar’s range and angular resolution limits.
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