UWB Platform for Vital Signs Detection and Monitoring

In this paper a non-invasive method for vital signs detection and monitoring employing ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) technology is proposed. The idea behind the proposed approach is to use UWB technology to measure the variations in RF communication channel characteristics to detect vital signs. The feasibility of the proposed approach was experimentally tested with custom developed software and hardware platform, based on Decawave DW1000 M module. The platform was specifically designed and optimized to enable data acquisition of physical parameters with high sampling rate. The experiment consisted of placing UWB transmitter and receiver units in predetermined positions on the anterior and posterior thoracic wall where the transmitter generates an ultra-short UWB pulse with a minimum bandwidth of 500 MHz. From the channel impulse response (CIR) of the UWB channel measured at the UWB receiver the information about the heart muscle contraction is extracted. The heart muscle contraction detection algorithm exploits on the fact that the heart movements are periodic and therefore suitable for detection in frequency domain. The algorithm for feature extraction processes the sampled signal frequency spectrum, in order to estimate the heart rate. The obtained results showed the validity of the proposed approach and the performance of the proposed method was evaluated in comparison with commercial ECG device.