Through the wall human heart beat detection using single channel CW radar

Abstract

Single-channel continuous wave (CW) radar is widely used and has gained popularity due to its simple architecture despite its inability to measure the range and angular location of the target. Its popularity arises in the industry due to the simplicity of the required components, the low demands on the sampling rate, and their low costs. Through-the-wall life signs detection using microwave Doppler Radar is an active area of research and investigation. Most of the work in the literature focused on utilizing multi-channel frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW), CW, and ultra-wideband (UWB) radar for their capability of range and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In this paper, through-the-wall single-subject and two-subject concurrent heart rate detection using single-channel 24-GHz CW radar leveraged with maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) is proposed. Experimental results demonstrated that the repetitive measurement of seven different subjects at a distance of 20 cm up to 100 cm through two different barriers (wood and brick wall) showed an average accuracy of heart rate extraction of 95.27% for varied distances (20–100 cm) in comparison with the Biopac ECG acquisition signal. Additionally, the MODWT method can also isolate the independent heartbeat waveforms from the two subjects’ concurrent measurements through the wall. This involved four trials with eight different subjects, achieving an accuracy of 97.04% for a fixed distance of 40 cm from the Radar without estimating the angular location of the subjects. Notably, it also superseded the performance of the direct FFT method for the single subject after 40 cm distance measurements. The proposed simpler architecture of single-channel CW radar leveraged with MODWT has several potential applications, including post-disaster search and rescue scenarios for finding the trapped, injured people under the debris, emergency evacuation, security, surveillance, and patient vital signs monitoring.