Vital sign monitoring systems are essential in the care of hospitalized neonates. Due to the immaturity of their organs and immune system, premature infants require continuous monitoring of their vital parameters and sensors need to be directly attached to their fragile skin. Besides mobility restrictions and stress, these sensors often cause skin irritation and may lead to pressure necrosis. In this work, we show that a contactless radar-based approach is viable for breathing monitoring in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). For the first time, different scenarios common to the NICU daily routine are investigated, and the challenges of monitoring in a real clinical setup are addressed through different contributions in the signal processing framework. Rather than just discarding measurements under strong interference, we present a novel random body movement mitigation technique based on the time-frequency decomposition of the recovered signal. In addition, we propose a simple and accurate frequency estimator which explores the harmonic structure of the breathing signal. As a result, the proposed radar-based solution is able to provide reliable breathing frequency estimation, which is close to the reference cabled device values most of the time. Our findings shed light on the strengths and limitations of this technology and lay the foundation for future studies toward a completely contactless solution for vital signs monitoring.
Noise Radar technology is the general term used to describe radar systems that employ realizations of a given stochastic process as transmit waveforms. Originally, carriers modulated in amplitude by a Gaussian random signal, derived from a hardware noise source, were taken into consideration, justifying the adopted nomenclature. With the advances made in hardware as well as the rise of the software defined noise radar concept, waveform design emerges as an important research area related to such systems. The possibility of generating signals with varied stochastic properties increased the potential in achieving systems with enhanced performances. The characterization of random phase and frequency modulated waveforms (more suitable for several applications) has then gained considerable notoriety within the radar community as well. Several optimization algorithms have been proposed in order to conveniently shape both the autocorrelation function of the random samples that comprise the transmit signal, as well as their power spectrum density. Nevertheless, little attention has been driven to properly characterize the stochastic properties of those signals through closed form expressions, jeopardizing the effectiveness of the aforementioned algorithms as well as their reproducibility. Within this context, this paper investigates the performance of several random phase and frequency modulated waveforms, varying the stochastic properties of their modulating signals.
This paper presents the joint design of discrete slow-time radar waveform and receive filter, with the aim of enhancing the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) in phase coded radar systems for vital-sign monitoring. Towards this, we consider maximizing the SINR at the input of the vitalsign estimation block, when transmitting hardware efficient Mary Phase Shift Keying (MPSK) sequences. This multi-variable and non-convex optimization problem is efficiently solved based on a Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) filter, with the Coordinate Descent (CD) approach for the sequence optimization, and the obtained results have shown attractive interference suppression capabilities, even for the simple binary case.
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