Robust Overnight Monitoring of Human Vital Signs by a Non-contact Respiration and Heartbeat Detector

A positive answer is given to the question intrigued by our previous work reported in EMBC 2005: whether it is possible for a non-contact physiological movement detector to detect vital signs from four sides of a human body. In addition to the proof from measured data, theoretical analysis confirms the surprising advantage of detection from the back of the body. Based on this observation, a non-contact system was set up to perform overnight monitoring of vital signs using low power radio waves. Measurement data is presented and analyzed. The challenges and key technologies that improved the performance of our system for overnight monitoring are discussed