Multivariate singular spectral analysis for heartbeat extraction in remote sensing of uwb impulse radar

[Display omitted] •UWB impulse radar remotely measure heartbeat signal.•Multivariate singular spectral analysis (MSSA) helps improve SNR and extraction of the heartbeat signal.•Both time domain signal and frequency of heartbeat could be extracted efficiently by MSSA. Remote sensing of the heartbeat signal is an important task in a smart home and smart hospital. Ultra-wideband impulse (UWB) radar is recently noticed as a promising and potential solution for the task. In this paper, we propose a method based on multivariate singular spectral analysis (MSSA) for efficient extraction of heartbeat signal in the mixing with respiration and noise signals. The proposed method takes into account the correlation of the harmonic components of the multivariate input signals; and, thus, it provides a solution for the extraction of the heartbeat signal in an efficient way. Experiments were performed with different people, different orientations, and various distances from 0.5m to 3.0m. The experiment results showed that the proposed MSSA method could improve heartbeat signals with an average of 40dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). And, it outperformed the CWT and SSA methods with averages of 32dB and 18dB SNR, respectively. The accuracy of measurement of the heart rates by the proposed MSSA method was 3.44 % (0.044Hz) of standard deviation error compared with a reference photoplethysmography (PPG).