Fast and cost-effective method for non-contact respiration rate tracking using UWB impulse radar

Abstract

Breathing rate monitoring for a long period provides a valuable indicator about human health and an early warning of possible disasters on the well-being. To gain a comfortable and adequate measurement without restricting the person's privacy, this study investigates a novel non-contact-based solution using ultra wide-band (UWB) impulse radar. We propose a fast and low-cost method for breathing events detection and respiration rate (RR) tracking. This novel approach consists of three main parts: vital signs (VS) patterns extraction based on the Generalized Goertzel Algorithm (GGA) avoiding the prior knowledge of the person's location and overcoming the effect of the clutter. RR tracking built on the complex adaptive notch filter (CANF) with a variable step size to obtain a robust estimation under the presence of sparse random body movement (SRBM) and fast tracking of the breath variability. Finally, we introduce a control chart of the breathing process using the double exponential moving average (DEMA) in order to detect the apnea events. The proposed method is evaluated using two sets of experiments, from mechanical vibrating structure to human subject. The results demonstrate that the proposed system is a promising and effective solution and provides wide usability for continuous monitoring applications. Moreover, it outperforms the state-of-the-art, in terms of computation cost and space complexity.