Radar-based remote physiological sensing: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Modern microwave Doppler radar-based physiological sensing is playing an important role in healthcare applications and during the last decade, there has been a significant advancement in this non-contact respiration sensing technology. The advantages of contactless, unobtrusive respiration monitoring have drawn interest in various medical applications such as sleep apnea, sudden infant death syndromes (SIDS), remote respiratory monitoring of burn victims, and COVID patients. This paper provides a perspective on recent advances in biomedical and healthcare applications of Doppler radar that can detect the tiny movement of the chest surfaces to extract heartbeat and respiration and its associated different vital signs parameters (tidal volume, heart rate variability (HRV), and so on) of the human subject. Additionally, it also highlights the challenges, and opportunities of this remote physiological sensing technology and several future research directions will be laid out to deploy this sensor technology in our day-to-day life.

Automated summary

Modern microwave Doppler radar-based physiological sensing technology plays an important role in healthcare applications. It can extract vital sign parameters such as respiration and heartbeat by detecting tiny movements on the surface of the chest, providing contactless and unobtrusive monitoring advantages. This technology has been widely used in monitoring sleep apnea, sudden infant death syndromes, burn victims, and COVID patients, with great potential.