Towards robust, unobtrusive sensing of respiration using ultra-wideband impulse radar for the care of people living with dementia

Abstract

The unobtrusive monitoring of vital signals and behaviour can be used to gather intelligence to support the care of people living with dementia. This can provide insights into the persons wellbeing and the neurogenerative process, as well as enable them to continue to live safely at home, thereby improving their quality of life. Within this context, this study investigated the deployability of non-contact respiration rate (RR) measurement based on an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar System-on-Chip (SoC). An algorithm was developed to simultaneously and continuously extract the respiration signal, together with the confidence level of the respiration signal and the target position, without needing any prior calibration. The radar-measured RR results were compared to the RR results obtained from a ground truth measure based on the breathing sound, and the error rates were within 8% with a mean value of 2.4%. The target localisation results match to the radarto-chest distances with a mean error rate of 5.4%. The tested measurement range was up to 5m. The results suggest that the algorithm could perform sufficiently well in non-contact stationary respiration rate detection.

Tiresias: A low-cost networked UWB radar system for in-home monitoring of dementia patients

“…Moving forward there are additional metrics that can be extracted from the data collected by Tiresias. Biometric monitoring has been shown to work with X4 data [6], and would provide an additional set of metrics to both aid locating stationary people in the observable scene provide more data on the health of patients. Moreover, biometric markers could help identify and distinguish different individuals being monitored in the same space without relying on wearable sensors or video.…”

“…Radar offers the strengths of both approaches by supplying high quality location and movement data, while being unobtrusive and maintaining as much privacy as possible within the scope of the desired monitoring. Additionally, radar can provide biometric data such as respiration and heart rate [6]- [8] that allow for ever greater insight into the health of patients. This paper describes Tiresias, a low-cost, unobtrusive networked radar system designed to monitor vulnerable patients in domestic environments and provide high quality behavioural and health data.…”

Accurate Heart Rate and Respiration Rate Detection Based on a Higher-Order Harmonics Peak Selection Method Using Radar Non-Contact Sensors

“…There is also another non-contact vital signs monitoring technique using radar sensors [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. The advantage of radar-based heart rate monitoring is that patients do not need to take off clothes and put on electrodes, which is convenient, and patients do not need to worry about privacy issues.…”

“…It can also provide a range of information. The study in [ 18 ] used IR-UWB radar to monitor the respiration of people with dementia. IR-UWB radar has also been used in car applications [ 19 ].…”