Vital signs, such as heart and respiratory rate, provide critical insight into a person’s health. Radar has been used to remotely analyze and detect human activity and vital signs for many years. Despite all the great features such as motion sensitivity, privacy preservation, penetrability, and more, radar has limited spatial degrees of freedom compared to optical sensors, which makes it a challenge to sense individual vital signs in crowded environments without prior information.
Researchers at Arizona State University have developed a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar system combined with a sensitive 3-D depth camera to detect the vital signs of multiple people simultaneously, including in crowded, complex environments. The dual-sensor system can automatically estimate torso landmarks from single or multiple subjects. Once mapped, chest movement related to cardiac and respiratory function can be detected and monitored. This system has been successfully tested in various multiple-subject scenarios.
This dual-sensing system improves existing physiological monitoring systems in realistic environments for use in telemedicine, smart homes, in-cabin monitoring, security surveillance systems and more.
Potential Applications
- Telemedicine/telehealth
- Smart homes
- In-cabin monitoring
- Security surveillance
- Biometric authentication
- Emotion recognition
- Emergency rescue
Benefits and Advantages
- Able to simultaneously detect vital signs of a group of closely spaced subjects, sitting and standing, in a cluttered environment
- Introducing computer vision significantly improves the radar sensing capability
- Utilizes an alignment algorithm to align the radar and camera systems to about 2cm precision in 3D space within a field of view of 75o by 65o and for a range of 2m
- Dual camera-radar system underlies the precision of coordinate identification and vital sign detection
- Motion sensitivity, privacy preservation, penetrability
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