Short time cardio-vascular pulses estimation for dengue fever screening via continuous-wave Doppler radar using empirical mode decomposition and continuous wavelet transform

Contactless measurement of cardio-vascular pulse acts an essential role in clinical medical sectors. Estimating cardio-vascular pulses based on continuous-wave (CW) Doppler radar in limited time while maintaining the accuracy is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a signal processing method that combines empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for a short time estimation of heart rate (HR) and inter-beat-interval from radar signals. We evaluate performance of the proposed method using 85 patients with dengue fever and 40 healthy subjects. Subsequently, the estimated contactless HR is compared to that of a commercial contact-type medical device. The result shows that the HR can be estimated within a period of 5 s with an accuracy of 96.2 ± 2.5%. The patients with dengue fever show an elevated HR and a decreased standard deviation of heartbeat interval (SDHI). Finally, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is utilized with two parameters HR and SDHI to classify the dengue patients, achieving the sensitivity and specificity values of 86.3% and 86.9%, respectively.