Radar System for Detecting Respiration Vital Sign of Live Victim Behind the Wall

The presence of an obstacle in detecting respiration vital signs using a radar system does not only exhibit attenuation and phase shift effects on the radar signal but also causes additional beat frequencies to appear beside those from the target. When a conventional FMCW radar system detects the peak of the received signal spectrum as a beat frequency, this will give an error of detection. The respiratory vital signs will then be undetectable. A method to overcome this obstacle problem is needed. Therefore the implementation of the FMCW radar system in detecting respiratory vital signs behind the wall can be realized. In this paper, a method to deal with the previously mentioned problem is proposed. The proposed method consists of a method for identifying the obstacle response. Then the results are used to eliminate the beat frequency that arises from the obstacle structure, and therefore the signal to clutter ratio (SCR) can be improved. Furthermore, the method is combined with the phase detection method, which is applied to extract the Doppler response related to the target respiratory vital signs. The weighting process by elaborating cross correlation is also employed for minimizing clutter from other objects reflection under debris. A laboratory experiment by developing an FMCW radar system with a 24 GHz frequency operation was performed in this research. The proposed detection method was elaborated in the post-processing of the radar system. The experiment result demonstrates that the proposed method is capable of eliminating the effect of the wall and successfully extracting the respiration vital sign pattern.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a method for detecting respiratory vital signs behind a wall using an FMCW radar system. The method eliminates beat frequencies from the obstacle structure and extracts the Doppler response related to the target respiratory vital signs using phase detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully eliminates the effect of the wall and extracts the respiration vital sign pattern.