Radar-based Measurement of the Body Movements of Multiple Students in Classroom Environments

We demonstrate the feasibility of the radar-based measurement of body movements in scenarios involving multiple students using a pair of 79-GHz millimeter-wave radar systems with array antennas. We quantify the body motion using the Doppler frequency calculated from radar echoes. The measurement accuracy is evaluated for two experimental scenarios, namely university students in an office and elementary school students in a classroom. The body movements measured using the two radar systems are compared to evaluate the repeatability and angle dependency of the measurement. Moreover, in the first scenario, we compare the radar-estimated body movement with subjective evaluation scores provided by two evaluators. In the first scenario, the coefficient of correlation between the radar-estimated body movement and the subjective evaluation score is 0.73 on average, with a maximum value of 0.97; in the second scenario, the average correlation coefficient of body movements measured using two radar systems is as high as 0.78. These results indicate that the proposed approach can be used to monitor the body movements of multiple students in realistic scenarios.

Individual Identification Using Radar-Measured Respiratory and Heartbeat Features

This study proposes a method for radar-based identification of individuals using a combination of their respiratory and heartbeat features. In the proposed method, the target individual's respiratory features are extracted using the modified raised-cosine-waveform model and their heartbeat features are extracted using the mel-frequency cepstral analysis technique. To identify a suitable combination of features and a classifier, we compare the performances of nine methods based on various combinations of three feature vectors with three classifiers. The accuracy of the proposed method in performing individual identification is evaluated using a 79-GHz millimeter-wave radar system with an antenna array in two experimental scenarios and we demonstrate the importance of use of the combination of the respiratory and heartbeat features in achieving accurate identification of individuals. The proposed method achieves accuracy of 96.33% when applied to a five-day dataset of six participants and 99.39% when applied to a public one-day dataset of thirty participants.

Accurate Radar-Based Heartbeat Measurement Using Higher Harmonic Components

This study proposes a radar-based heartbeat measurement method that uses the absolute value of the second derivative of the complex radar signal, rather than its phase, and the variational mode extraction method, which is a type of mode decomposition algorithm. We show that the proposed second-derivative-based approach can amplify the heartbeat component in radar signals effectively and also confirm that use of the variational mode extraction method represents an efficient way to emphasize the heartbeat component amplified via the second-derivative-based approach. We demonstrate estimation of the heart interbeat intervals using the proposed approach in combination with the topology method, which is an accurate interbeat interval estimation method. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated quantitatively using data obtained from eleven participants that were measured using a millimeter-wave radar system. When compared with conventional methods based on the phase of the complex radar signal, our proposed method can achieve higher accuracy when estimating the heart interbeat intervals; the correlation coefficient for the proposed method was increased by 0.20 and the root-mean-square error decreased by 23%.

Radar Positioning for Accurate Sensing of Pulse Waves at Multiple Sites Using a 3D Human Model

This study proposes a sensing method using a millimeter-wave array radar and a depth camera to measure pulse waves at multiple sites on the human body. Using a three-dimensional shape model of the target human body measured by the depth camera, the method identifies reflection sites on the body through electromagnetic scattering simulation. On the basis of the simulation, the radar system can be positioned at a suitable location for measuring pulse waves depending on the posture of the target person. Through measurements using radar and depth camera systems, we demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate the body displacement waveform caused by pulse waves accurately, improving the accuracy by 14% compared with a conventional approach without a depth camera. The proposed method can be a key to realizing an accurate and noncontact sensor for monitoring blood pressure.

Noncontact Detection of Sleep Apnea Using Radar and Expectation-Maximization Algorithm

Sleep apnea syndrome requires early diagnosis because this syndrome can lead to a variety of health problems. If sleep apnea events can be detected in a noncontact manner using radar, we can then avoid the discomfort caused by the contact-type sensors that are used in conventional polysomnography. This study proposes a novel radar-based method for accurate detection of sleep apnea events. The proposed method uses the expectation-maximization algorithm to extract the respiratory features that form normal and abnormal breathing patterns, resulting in an adaptive apnea detection capability without any requirement for empirical parameters. We conducted an experimental quantitative evaluation of the proposed method by performing polysomnography and radar measurements simultaneously in five patients with the symptoms of sleep apnea syndrome. Through these experiments, we show that the proposed method can detect the number of apnea and hypopnea events per hour with an error of 4.8 times/hour; this represents an improvement in the accuracy by 1.8 times when compared with the conventional threshold-based method and demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Complex Number Assignment in the Topology Method for Heartbeat Interval Estimation Using Millimeter-Wave Radar

The topology method is an algorithm for accurate estimation of instantaneous heartbeat intervals using millimeter-wave radar signals. In this model, feature points are extracted from the skin displacement waveforms generated by heartbeats and a complex number is assigned to each feature point. However, these numbers have been assigned empirically and without solid justification. This study used a simplified model of displacement waveforms to predict the optimal choice of the complex number assignments to feature points corresponding to inflection points, and the validity of these numbers was confirmed using analysis of a publicly available dataset.

Radar-Based Noncontact Measurement of Heartbeat of Humans and Chimpanzees Using Millimeter-Wave Radar with Topology Method

This study proposes a method to determine the filter parameters required for the topology method, which is a radar-based noncontact method for measurement of heart inter-beat intervals. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by performing radar measurements involving both human participants and chimpanzee subjects. The proposed method is designed to enable setting of the filter cutoff frequency to eliminate respiratory components while maintaining the higher harmonics of the heartbeat components. Measurements using a millimeter-wave radar system and a reference contact-type electrocardiogram sensor demonstrate that the smallest errors that occur when measuring heart inter-beat intervals using the proposed method can be as small as 4.43 and 2.55 ms for humans and chimpanzees, respectively. These results indicate the possibility of using noncontact physiological measurements to monitor both humans and chimpanzees.

Radar-Based Estimation of Human Body Orientation Using Respiratory Features and Hierarchical Regression Model

This study proposes an accurate method to estimate human body orientation using a millimeter-wave radar system. Body displacement is measured from the phase of the radar echo, which is analyzed to obtain features associated with the fundamental and higher-order harmonic components of the quasi-periodic respiratory motion. These features are used in body-orientation estimation invoking a novel hierarchical regression model in which a logistic regression model is adopted in the first step to determine whether the target person is facing forwards or backwards; a pair of ridge regression models are employed in the second step to estimate body-orientation angle. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, respiratory motions of five participants were recorded using three millimeter-wave radar systems; cross-validation was also performed. The average error in estimating body orientation angle was 38.3$^\circ$ and 23.1$^\circ$ using respectively a conventional method with only the fundamental frequency component and our proposed method, indicating an improvement in accuracy by factor 1.7 when using the proposed method. In addition, the coefficient of correlation between the actual and estimated body-orientation angles using the conventional and proposed methods are 0.74 and 0.91, respectively. These results show that by combining the characteristic features of the fundamental and higher-order harmonics from the respiratory motion, the proposed method offers better accuracy.

Radar-Based Respiratory Measurement of a Rhesus Monkey by Suppressing Nonperiodic Body Motion Components

We propose a method to measure the respiration of a rhesus monkey using a millimeter-wave radar system with an antenna array. Unlike humans, small animals are generally restless and hyperactive in nature, and suppression of their body motion components is thus necessary to realize accurate respiratory measurements. The proposed method detects and suppresses nonperiodic body motion components while also combining and emphasizing the periodic components from multiple echoes acquired from the target. Results indicate that the proposed method can measure respiration rate of the target monkey accurately, even with frequent body movements.

Stepped-frequency DORT Imaging with Singular Value Decomposition for a Single-antenna Ultrawideband Radar in Multi-path Environments

Ultrawideband radar is an attractive technology for a variety of applications including security systems. As such, it is essential to develop low-cost systems that produce clear target images. Electromagnetic inverse scattering with time-reversal imaging has been studied for a variety of applications. The time-reversal method, however, uses large-scale antenna arrays, making the system potentially more costly. In this study, we propose an ultrawideband radar imaging algorithm, namely the stepped-frequency DORT algorithm, that uses multi-path scattering for a single antenna. The proposed imaging method is an extension of the conventional DORT method, and uses a frequency-frequency matrix that is suitable for a system with a single antenna. The performance of the proposed method is verified through numerical simulations.