Vital Sign Monitoring and Mobile Phone Usage Detection Using IR-UWB Radar for Intended Use in Car Crash Prevention

Abstract

In order to avoid car crashes, active safety systems are becoming more and more important. Many crashes are caused due to driver drowsiness or mobile phone usage. Detecting the drowsiness of the driver is very important for the safety of a car. Monitoring of vital signs such as respiration rate and heart rate is important to determine the occurrence of driver drowsiness. In this paper, robust vital signs monitoring through impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar is discussed. We propose a new algorithm that can estimate the vital signs even if there is motion caused by the driving activities. We analyzed the whole fast time vital detection region and found the signals at those fast time locations that have useful information related to the vital signals. We segmented those signals into sub-signals and then constructed the desired vital signal using the correlation method. In this way, the vital signs of the driver can be monitored noninvasively, which can be used by researchers to detect the drowsiness of the driver which is related to the vital signs i.e., respiration and heart rate. In addition, texting on a mobile phone during driving may cause visual, manual or cognitive distraction of the driver. In order to reduce accidents caused by a distracted driver, we proposed an algorithm that can detect perfectly a driver's mobile phone usage even if there are various motions of the driver in the car or changes in background objects. These novel techniques, which monitor vital signs associated with drowsiness and detect phone usage before a driver makes a mistake, may be very helpful in developing techniques for preventing a car crash.

An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Remote Health Monitoring Using Impulse Radio UWB Transceiver

“…Recently, IR-UWB technology has been used in many applications due to its characteristics such as robustness in a harsh environment, accurate ranging at the level centimeters, less power consumption and good object penetration capacity [4]. Impulse radar has been used in many fields such as localization [5], medical [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], multihuman detection [25,26], gesture recognition [27][28][29][30], imaging [31,32], tumor vital signs are presented. The main focus of this research is on vital signs monitoring using IR-UWB radar; therefore, most sections of the paper (Sections 2-9) are related to vital signs.…”

Vital Sign Monitoring in Car Seats Based on Electrocardiography, Ballistocardiography and Seismocardiography: A Review

“…Leem et al [ 128 ] proposed a new algorithm, which estimates vital signs even when random movement occurs. The entire fast detection area of vital signs was analyzed and signals, obtained while driving, provided useful information regarding drivers’ condition.…”

Non-Contact Driver Respiration Rate Detection Technology Based on Suppression of Multipath Interference with Directional Antenna

“…Mehrotra summarized the EM-Wave Biosensors including microwave and mm-wave [11]. In general, there are two types of bio-radar: ultra-wideband bio-radar (UWB) [12][13][14] and continuous wave radar [15,16]. UWB has a large bandwidth and small power consumption.…”