2010 Volume E93.B Issue 9 Pages 2416-2423
The importance of respiratory monitoring systems during sleep have increased due to early diagnosis of sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) in the home. This paper presents a simple respiratory monitoring system suitable for home use having 3D ranging of targets. The range resolution and azimuth resolution are obtained by a stepped frequency transmitting signal and MIMO arrays with preferred pair M-sequence codes doubly modulating in transmission and reception, respectively. Due to the use of these codes, Gold sequence codes corresponding to all the antenna combinations are equivalently modulated in receiver. The signal to interchannel interference ratio of the reconstructed image is evaluated by numerical simulations. The results of experiments on a developed prototype 3D-MIMO radar system show that this system can extract only the motion of respiration of a human subject 2m apart from a metallic rotatable reflector. Moreover, it is found that this system can successfully measure the respiration information of sleeping human subjects for 96.6 percent of the whole measurement time except for instances of large posture change.