Non-invasive Diver Respiration Rate Monitoring in Hyperbaric Lifeboat Environments using Short-Range Radar

The monitoring of diver health during emergency events is crucial to ensuring the safety of personnel. A non-invasive system continuously providing a measure of the respiration rate of individual divers is exceedingly beneficial in this context. The paper reports on the application of short-range radar to record the respiration rate of divers within hyperbaric lifeboat environments. Results demonstrate that the respiratory motion can be extracted from the radar return signal applying routine signal processing. Further, evidence is provided that the radar-based approach yields a more accurate measure of respiration rate than an audio signal from a headset microphone. The system promotes an improvement in evacuation protocols under critical operational scenarios.

On Models and Approaches for Human Vital Signs Extraction from Short Range Radar Signals

The paper centres on an assessment of the modelling approaches for the processing of signals in CW and FMCW radar-based systems for the detection of vital signs. It is shown that the use of the widely adopted phase extraction method, which relies on the approximation of the target as a single point scatterer, has limitations in respect of the simultaneous estimation of both respiratory and heart rates. A method based on a velocity spectrum is proposed as an alternative with the ability to treat a wider range of application scenarios.

A Novel Micro-Doppler Coherence Loss for Deep Learning Radar Applications

Deep learning techniques are subject to increasing adoption for a wide range of micro-Doppler applications, where predictions need to be made based on time-frequency signal representations. Most, if not all, of the reported applications focus on translating an existing deep learning framework to this new domain with no adjustment made to the objective function. This practice results in a missed opportunity to encourage the model to prioritize features that are particularly relevant for micro-Doppler applications. Thus the paper introduces a micro-Doppler coherence loss, minimized when the normalized power of micro-Doppler oscillatory components between input and output is matched. The experiments conducted on real data show that the application of the introduced loss results in models more resilient to noise.

Interference Motion Removal for Doppler Radar Vital Sign Detection Using Variational Encoder-Decoder Neural Network

The treatment of interfering motion contributions remains one of the key challenges in the domain of radar-based vital sign monitoring. Removal of the interference to extract the vital sign contributions is demanding due to overlapping Doppler bands, the complex structure of the interference motions and significant variations in the power levels of their contributions. A novel approach to the removal of interference through the use of a probabilistic deep learning model is presented. Results show that a convolutional encoder-decoder neural network with a variational objective is capable of learning a meaningful representation space of vital sign Doppler-time distribution facilitating their extraction from a mixture signal. The approach is tested on semi-experimental data containing real vital sign signatures and simulated returns from interfering body motions. The application of the proposed network enhances the extraction of the micro-Doppler frequency corresponding to the respiration rate is demonstrated.