Design and Measurements of mmWave FMCW Radar Based Non-Contact Multi-Patient Heart Rate and Breath Rate Monitoring System

2025-11-26

AI Summary

To address the challenge of concurrent, contactless vital sign monitoring for multiple patients, this paper proposes a high-precision, synchronous heart rate (HR) and respiration rate (RR) estimation method based on millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar. The approach integrates signal preprocessing, adaptive motion artifact suppression, and multi-target spectral separation via a least-squares solution fusion strategy. Implemented on a Texas Instruments radar hardware platform, it enables unobtrusive, simultaneous physiological signal acquisition from multiple subjects. The method significantly enhances estimation robustness and cross-scenario generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate RR and HR estimation accuracies of 97.2% and 93.5%, respectively—surpassing state-of-the-art single- and multi-subject contactless monitoring approaches. This work provides a scalable, highly reliable technical framework for large-scale clinical monitoring applications.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation

Abstract

Recent developments in mmWave radar technologies have enabled the truly non-contact heart-rate (HR) and breath-rate (BR) measurement approaches, which provides a great ease in patient monitoring. Additionally, these technologies also provide opportunities to simultaneously detect HR and BR of multiple patients, which has become increasingly important for efficient mass monitoring scenarios. In this work, a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) mmWave radar based truly non-contact multiple patient HR and BR monitoring system has been presented. Furthermore, a novel approach is also proposed, which combines multiple processing methods using a least squares solution to improve measurement accuracy, generalization, and handle measurement error. The proposed system has been developed using Texas Instruments' FMCW radar and experimental results with multiple subjects are also presented, which show >97% and >93% accuracy in the measured BR and HR values, respectively.

Problem

• Non-contact monitoring of heart and breath rates
• Simultaneous vital sign detection for multiple patients
• Improving measurement accuracy using multi-method fusion

Innovation

• FMCW mmWave radar for non-contact vital sign monitoring
• Multiple processing methods combined via least squares solution
• Simultaneous heart and breath rate detection for multiple patients