What is it about?

The radar technology is used for various applications in the healthcare field, and studies have been conducted to obtain physiological information such as respiration and heartbeat in a non-contacting state of human body by using the radar technology. This study focuses on extracting the heartbeat information using ultra-wideband impulse radar, and a new method that can extract not only the heart rate but also the timing of the heartbeat with high accuracy is proposed herein.

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Why is it important?

This study proposes a method of detecting a heartbeat by using an image processing method after converting a set of piled-up radar pulses into an image. This method has been never attempted before, and it can not only extract the heartbeat frequency with high accuracy, but also provide the information for time of when a heartbeat occurred. This means that it can be used for detecting abnormal symptoms of heart activity such as bradycardia and tachycardia.

Perspectives

In a short term, it is expected that the radar will be used for monitoring heart activity, blood pressure, respiration, quality of sleep, fall-down, etc. of healthy person or patient. Furthermore, these functions can be implemented on a wearable device or smartphone so that anyone can use the radar technology to easily monitor the health. In a long term, the radar technology can be applied to human gesture recognition, activity classification, etc. to acquire comprehensive information for a human body.

Hui-Sup Cho
DGIST

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Monitoring heart activity using ultra-wideband radar, Electronics Letters, June 2019, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the IET),
DOI: 10.1049/el.2019.1438.
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