ECG-grained Cardiac Monitoring Using UWB Signals

Abstract

With the development of wireless sensing, researchers have proposed many contactless vital sign monitoring systems, which can be used to monitor respiration rates, heart rates, cardiac cycles and etc. However, these vital signs are ones of coarse granularity, so they are less helpful in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Considering that electrocardiogram (ECG) is an important evidence base for the diagnoses of CVDs, we propose to generate ECGs from ultra-wideband (UWB) signals in a contactless manner as a fine-grained cardiac monitoring solution. Specifically, we analyze the properties of UWB signals containing heartbeats and respiration, and design two complementary heartbeat signal restoration methods to perfectly recover heartbeat signal variation. To establish the mapping between the mechanical activity of the heart sensed by UWB devices and the electrical activity of the heart recorded in ECGs, we construct a conditional generative adversarial network to encode the mapping between mechanical activity and electrical activity and propose a contrastive learning strategy to reduce the interference from noise in UWB signals. We build the corresponding cardiac monitoring system named RF-ECG and conduct extensive experiments using about 120,000 heartbeats from more than 40 participants. The experimental results show that the ECGs generated by RF-ECG have good performance in both ECG intervals and morphology compared with the ground truth. Moreover, diseases such as tachycardia/bradycardia, sinus arrhythmia, and premature contractions can be diagnosed from the ECGs generated by our RF-ECG.