Power-Based Real-Time Respiration Monitoring Using FMCW Radar

Non-contact vital sign detection is a required application nowadays in many fields as patient monitoring and static human detection. Within the last decade, radar has been introduced as a smart and convenient sensor for non-contact respiration monitoring. Radar sensors are considered suitable for such application for its capability to work through obstacles and in harsh environmental conditions. FMCW radar has been introduced as a powerful tool in this field for its capability of detecting both the breathing target position and his chest micro-motions induced due to breathing. Most of the presented techniques for using the radar for respiration detection is based on bandpass filtering or wavelet transforms on the required harmonics in either the range or Doppler dimension. However, both techniques affect the real-time capability of the monitoring and work on limited distances and aspect angles. A recognizable fluctuation effect is observed in the received range spectrum overtime due to respiration chest movements. The proposed technique in this paper is based on detecting and processing the power changes in real-time over different aspect angles and distances. Two radar modules working on different carrier frequency bands, bandwidths and output power levels were tested and compared.