Non-Contact Cardiac Activity Monitoring using Pulsed Laser Vibrometer

We demonstrate experimentally the detection of detailed human cardiac mechanical activity in a remote, non-contacting, and non-ionizing manner using a pulsed laser vibrometer. The highly sensitive pulsed laser vibrometer allows the detection of the temporally-phased mechanical events occurring in individual cardiac cycles even from the surface of clothing-covered extremities of the subjects. Fine structures of the detected cardiac traces are identified with their meanings assigned and corroborated using accelerometer and electrocardiogram measurements obtained concurrently with the pulsed laser vibrometer studies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]