Experimental vital signs estimation using commercially available IR-UWB radar

This paper studies the feasibility of estimating vital signs exploiting commercially available Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) radar. The focus is on extracting breathing and heart beat rates following the consideration of a nonstationary analytical model for the reflected signal from the human body. The Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT), which is adaptive to nonlinear and nonstationary signals, is proposed and applied to the intrinsic mode functions of the received signal providing frequency information evolving with time and quantifying the amount of variation due to different signal content contribution. Experimental results are presented demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed technique for determining respiration and heartbeat rates.