Methods For The Next Generation Of Contactless Doppler Radar Based Vital Signs Monitoring Sensors

Vital signs, such as heart rate and respiration rate, are useful to health monitoring because they can provide important physiological insights for medical diagnosis and well-being management. Most traditional methods for measuring vital signs require a person to wear biomedical devices, such as a capnometer, a pulse oximeter, or an electrocardiogram sensor. These contact-based technologies are inconvenient, cumbersome, and uncomfortable to use. There is a compelling need for technologies that enable contact-free, easily deployable, and long-term monitoring of vital signs for healthcare. Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring presents a systematic and in-depth review on the principles, methodologies, and opportunities of using different wavelengths of an electromagnetic spectrum to measure vital signs from the human face and body contactlessly. The volume brings together pioneering researchers active in the field to report the latest progress made, in an intensive and structured way. It also presents various healthcare applications using camera and radio frequency-based monitoring, from clinical care to home care, to sport training and automotive, such as patient/neonatal monitoring in intensive care units, general wards, emergency department triage, MR/CT cardiac and respiratory gating, sleep centers, baby/elderly care, fitness cardio training, driver monitoring in automotive settings, and more. This book will be an important educational source for biomedical researchers, AI healthcare researchers, computer vision researchers, wireless-sensing researchers, doctors/clinicians, physicians/psychologists, and medical equipment manufacturers. Includes various contactless vital signs monitoring techniques, such as optical-based, radar-based, WiFi-based, RFID-based, and acoustic-based methods. Presents a thorough introduction to the measurement principles, methodologies, healthcare applications, hardware set-ups, and systems for contactless measurement of vital signs using camera or RF sensors. Presents the opportunities for the fusion of camera and RF sensors for contactless vital signs monitoring and healthcare.

Presents a comprehensive description of the theory and practical implementation of Doppler radar-based physiological monitoring This book includes an overview of current physiological monitoring techniques and explains the fundamental technology used in remote non-contact monitoring methods. Basic radio wave propagation and radar principles are introduced along with the fundamentals of physiological motion and measurement. Specific design and implementation considerations for physiological monitoring radar systems are then discussed in detail. The authors address current research and commercial development of Doppler radar based physiological monitoring for healthcare and other applications. Explains pros and cons of different Doppler radar architectures, including CW, FMCW, and pulsed Doppler radar Discusses nonlinear demodulation methods, explaining dc offset, dc information, center tracking, and demodulation enabled by dc cancellation Reviews advanced system architectures that address issues of dc offset, spectrum folding, motion interference, and range resolution Covers Doppler radar physiological measurements demonstrated to date, from basic cardiopulmonary rate extractions to more involved volume assessments Doppler Radar Physiological Sensing serves as a fundamental reference for radar, biomedical, and microwave engineers as well as healthcare professionals interested in remote physiological monitoring methods.

This book serves as the first guideline of the integrative approach, optimal for our new and young generations. Recent technology advancements in computer vision, IoT sensors, and analytics open the door to highly impactful innovations and applications as a result of effective and efficient integration of those. Such integration has brought to scientists and engineers a new approach —the integrative approach. This offers far more rapid development and scalable architecting when comparing to the traditional hardcore developmental approach. Featuring biomedical and healthcare challenges including COVID-19, we present a collection of carefully selective cases with significant added- values as a result of integrations, e.g., sensing with AI, analytics with different data sources, and comprehensive monitoring with many different sensors, while sustaining its readability.

Wireless sensing find many biomedical applications due to the benefit and convenience of having no contact with the patients. Low power radio waves, that are biologically safe, can monitor the patient's medical conditions such as the breathing and heart beat rate. Electro-magnetic (EM) waves extract the small movements of the chest and heart via field disturbance phenomena. The patient's breathing and heart beat modulate the radio waves for the vital signs to be monitored in real-time. Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar is an EM scattering technology that has been proven to discriminate targets with less than 30mm range resolution, which is smaller than the average size of a human heart. The UWB radar emits 200ps pulses that occupy a bandwidth from 3 to 10GHz. For linearly polarized radiation, the radar cross-section (RCS) of a moving target having complex shapes such as the thorax section of a human body causes regular fading. The scattering from a complex target rotates the radio wave vector to result in non-optimal signal reception due to polarization losses. The research focuses on the design of a circularly polarized (CP) UWB radar system for contactless vital signs monitoring of a patient. Circular polarization is introduced to address the fading RCS problem thus achieving a more robust system. The same CP UWB radar system with radio waves that penetrate through dielectric objects can be used for time-critical rescue operations in locating survivors buried under collapsed structures or in buildings engulfed in flames where visibility is hampered. Furthermore, by employing material characterization and microwave imaging techniques, it is possible to use the proposed system for other biomedical applications such as tumor localization and damaged tissue identification. The thesis is organized as follows. Firstly, the operation of UWB radar is presented and the research topic addressed. The pulse generator design suited for low pulse repetition rates is then introduced. The design of a decade bandwidth circularly polarized antenna array is described. The methodology and performance of the robust vital signs monitoring system is shown and compared with the linear polarized counterpart. A new method for material characterization using time domain RCS measurements is demonstrated. The future work is finally proposed.

This book here proposed aims to research the possibility of improving the monitoring heart activity in order to obtain a more complete status of the heart. Finally it shows how cardiac physiological variables acquirable connected with a long period acquisition and sensor integration in textile substrate for producing a wearable system which can monitoring the heart of the subject during different physical activities. This wearable system is based on a single transceiver, which must have high sensitivity, able of acquiring information about respiratory activity, heartbeat, heart apex pulse, cardiac sounds and movement profile of the heart wall. This research proposes analysis and realization of two systems based on two different principles. The first is based on a bimodal ultrasonic transducer and the second is based on a Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) radar. Innovative aspects are in the technologies used such as microelectronic units, in multi-signal acquisition and elaboration routines, in the sensor technique such as multi-modal transceivers and textile integration and in medical signals picture. Introducing the correlation of standard vital signals with heart mechanical information.

This textbook provides a comprehensive, yet practically orientated overview of classic and novel sports cardiology topics, based on current evidence, guidelines, recommendations and expert experience. Numerous publications have provided guidance to these issues, but it has become increasingly difficult for both students and doctors to obtain a thorough, but practicable overview for optimal clinical care of athletes and patients. This book is intended as an educational work, filling the large gaps that are still present in the current educational guidelines for medical students and cardiology trainees. Textbook of Sports and Exercise Cardiology differs from other sports cardiology books by focusing on clear, practical recommendations based on the latest evidence, primarily targeting those who seek professional background information and education that can easily be transferred into everyday care.

This book documents the state of the art in the field of ambient assisted living (AAL), highlighting the impressive potential of novel methodologies and technologies to enhance well-being and promote active ageing. The coverage is wide ranging, with sections on care models and algorithms, enabling technologies and assistive solutions, elderly people monitoring, home rehabilitation, ICT solutions for AAL, living with chronic conditions, robotic assistance for the elderly, sensing technologies for AAL, and smart housing. The book comprises a selection of the best papers presented at the 9th Italian Forum on Ambient Assisted Living (ForitAAL 2018), which was held in Lecce, Italy, in July 2018 and brought together end users, technology teams, and policy makers to develop a consensus on how to improve provision for elderly and impaired people. Readers will find that the expert contributions offer clear insights into the ways in which the most recent exciting advances may be expected to assist in addressing the needs of the elderly and those with chronic conditions.

Sensor technology for monitoring vital signs is an important topic for various service applications, such as entertainment and personalization platforms and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, as well as traditional medical purposes, such as disease indication judgments and predictions. Vital signs for monitoring include respiration and heart rates, body temperature, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, electrocardiogram, blood glucose concentration, brain waves, etc. Gait and walking length can also be regarded as vital signs because they can indirectly indicate human activity and status. Sensing technologies include contact sensors such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), photoplethysmogram (PPG), non-contact sensors such as ballistocardiography (BCG), and invasive/non-invasive sensors for diagnoses of variations in blood characteristics or body fluids. Radar, vision, and infrared sensors can also be useful technologies for detecting vital signs from the movement of humans or organs. Signal processing, extraction, and analysis techniques are important in industrial applications along with hardware implementation techniques. Battery management and wireless power transmission technologies, the design and optimization of low-power circuits, and systems for continuous monitoring and data collection/transmission should also be considered with sensor technologies. In addition, machine-learning-based diagnostic technology can be used for extracting meaningful information from continuous monitoring data.

A digital signal processor for Doppler radar sensing of vital signs is described. A voltage waveform signal containing respiration and heartbeat signatures is low-pass filtered (0.7 Hz) for the respiration and band-pass filtered (1.0 - 3.0 Hz) for the heart signal. The autocorrelation function is used to calculate the rate per minute for each of these signals. To make the processor more robust, several signal processing techniques are applied. One of these techniques, a method commonly used on audio signals for formant removal, is called center clipping. Another technique is the use of a Hanning window. To reverse the distinct shape left by the Hanning window an "undo" window is applied. The processor Is programmed in LabVIEW.