Contactless Breathing Rate Monitoring in Vehicle Using UWB Radar

Zhicheng Yang, Maurizio Bocca, Vivek Jain, Prasant Mohapatra

Abstract: Monitoring human vital signs is fundamental to assess a person's general health and detect events such as respiratory distress or heart attacks. As vehicle driving occupies a considerable part of daily lives, monitoring vital signs of a driver is necessary for early detecting potential health issues during driving. However, it is also important to ensure that the driver is neither distracted nor uncomfortable while monitoring. It is thus a challenge to develop contactless and ubiquitous vital sign monitoring. This paper presents contactless breathing rate monitoring for drivers using an impulse ultra-wide band (UWB) radar. We demonstrate that UWB frequency reflects signals from human body and validate a UWB radar for detecting the minute chest movement. Two signal processing methods are designed and evaluated for online and off-line analysis. We investigate 16 different radar positions in a vehicle for robust breathing rate monitoring under the circumstance of body motions during driving. We also perform on-road experiments at a local city and achieve a mean of 1.06 breathing rate estimation error per minute.