Noncontact Monitoring of Heartbeat and Movements during Sleep Using a Pair of Millimeter-wave Ultra-wideband Radar Systems

Abstract

We experimentally evaluate the performance of a noncontact system that measures the heartbeat of a sleeping person. The proposed system comprises a pair of radar systems installed at two different positions. We use millimeter-wave ultra-wideband multiple-input multiple-output array radar systems and evaluate the performance attained in measuring the heart inter-beat interval and body movement. The importance of using two radar systems instead of one is demonstrated in this paper. We conduct three types of experiments; the first and second experiments are radar measurements of three participants lying on a bed with and without body movement, while the third experiment is the radar measurement of a participant actually sleeping overnight. The experiments demonstrate that the performance of the radar-based vital measurement strongly depends on the orientation of the person under test. They also show that the proposed system detects 70% of rolling-over movements made overnight.