A Modified Two-Dimension EEMD Method for Breathing and Heart Rates Monitoring via Through-Wall IR-UWB Radar

Abstract

Vital signal monitoring is conducive to the diagnosis of a variety of diseases, which can be used to learn patients’ health status. To avoid cross infection (for example infectious diseases), non-contact vital sign detection has attracted more and more attention. In this paper, an important hospital scenario, i.e., the medical staff and infectious disease patients are separated by glass wall, is considered. Under the considered scenario, an through-and-wall impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) system placed on the room of the medical staff is adopted to obtain the information of the patient’s heart rate and breathing rate, thus cutting off direct contact between the medical staff and infectious disease patients. To this end, the basic idea is that the received through-and-wall IR-UWB echo signal is subtracted to the environmental noise via a background noise removal method, then an modified two-dimension ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method is proposed to analyze the remained echo signal, thus obtaining respiration rate and heartbeat rate. Compared with the conventional two-dimension EEMD, the modified two-dimension EEMD method has lower complexity and increases the computational speed. The experimental results of the proposed method show that the average errors of breathing and heart rates are 1.6% and 4.3%, respectively.