A Clinically Evaluated Interferometric Continuous-Wave Radar System for the Contactless Measurement of Human Vital Parameters

Vital parameters are key indicators for the assessment of health. Conventional methods rely on direct contact with the patients’ skin and can hence cause discomfort and reduce autonomy. This article presents a bistatic 24 GHz radar system based on an interferometric six-port architecture and features a precision of 1 µm in distance measurements. Placed at a distance of 40 cm in front of the human chest, it detects vibrations containing respiratory movements, pulse waves and heart sounds. For the extraction of the respiration rate, time-domain approaches like autocorrelation, peaksearch and zero crossing rate are compared to the Fourier transform, while template matching and a hidden semi-Markov model are utilized for the detection of the heart rate from sphygmograms and heart sounds. A medical study with 30 healthy volunteers was conducted to collect 5.5 h of data, where impedance cardiogram and electrocardiogram were used as gold standard for synchronously recording respiration and heart rate, respectively. A low root mean square error for the breathing rate (0.828 BrPM) and a high overall F1 score for heartbeat detection (93.14%) could be achieved using the proposed radar system and signal processing.