Wireless Sensing of Human Respiratory Parameters by Low-Power Ultrawideband Impulse Radio Radar

The simultaneous tracking of the chest respiratory rate and amplitude of human beings using a low-power ultrawideband (UWB) impulse radio signal is investigated for the application of sleep apnea monitoring. The measurement of respiratory amplitude, in addition to the breathing rate, is crucial for sleep apnea assessment which requires, among other things, the accurate estimation of tidal volume per minute. Backscattered UWB impulse radio signals from a human subject are detected in the time domain to calculate the chest displacements in this paper. Since the pulse disposition in time is linearly related to the chest movement, the amplitude of the chest movement can be extracted accurately without calculation approximations normally used in many of the existing methods. The multipeak detection of the pulse disposition method, instead of using only the single pulse peak detection, is also proposed to improve the accuracy of the calculation further. The experiments are carried out on four human subjects with different sizes and genders. The correlation of the chest movements' amplitude and breathing rate between the simultaneously measured results obtained by our method and by the respiratory chest band is very good.