IEEE ICASSP 2022

Presented by: Yonathan Eder, The Weizmann Institute of Science Oded Cohen, The Weizmann Institute of Science Shlomi Savariego, The Weizmann Institute of Science Nimrod Glazer, The Weizmann Institute of Science Yonina C. Eldar, The Weizmann Institute of Science

In this demonstration, we propose a dedicated phantom that simulates human thoracic displacements through which realistic experiments for contactless vital signs monitoring using FMCW radars can be performed, circumventing the need to perform human trials. In addition, we present a technique for contactless monitoring of heart rate (HR) and respiration rate (RR) using the simulated thoracic pattern, based on sparse recovery methods and optimization [1]. Contactless technology for the monitoring of human vital signs, such as respiration and heartbeat, has become a necessity in recent years due to the rising cardiopulmonary morbidity, the risk of transmitting diseases, and the heavy burden on the medical staff. FMCW radars have shown great potential in addressing these needs, however, to enable the widespread use of this technology one must provide uncompromising estimation results. To address this challenge, methods must be developed that remotely extract physiological parameters from realistic FMCW signals. However, these signals are difficult to obtain for reasons of privacy, costs, and regulation. Furthermore, existing processing techniques, do not have high resolution and do not provide adequate performance. Using the proposed phantom, a unique and repetitive simulation can be performed to examine the performance of different methods for contactless human vital signs monitoring, while dealing with real physical phenomena that are difficult to emulate in a software simulation. In addition, the ability to compare to the Ground-Truth is enhanced, since the input signal to the phantom is controlled. Our demonstration platform consists of (1) a Vibration generator for generating mechanical thoracic displacements. (2) A flat circular metal plate (24 cm diameter), for the purpose of imitating a human thorax from which the transmitted radar signals are reflected. (3) TI IWR1642 77GHz mmWave sensor. (4) A dedicated experimental setup. By using a dedicated GUI, both on-site and online attendees can evident contactless human vital signs monitoring by several methods utilizing the proposed phantom. We also show the advantage of using our proposed method based on sparse recovery.

[1] Y. Eder, D. Khodyrker, and Y.C. Eldar, “Sparsity Based Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring of Multiple People via FMCW Radar”, In Preparation.