Development of a Stand-Alone Physiological Monitoring System for Noncontact Heart and Respiration Rate Measurements on Real-Time Linux Platform

摘要

We developed a stand-alone physiological monitoring system without any constraints on its users for daily life healthcare. The system measures tiny movements on a body surface induced by heartbeat and respiration in a noncontact manner using a 24-GHz microwave radar. To extract the related signals from the radar output, an analog band pass filter was designed and integrated into a printed circuit board. The software was developed on an embedded Linux platform for a stand-alone and modular design. To assess the performance of noncontact physiological monitoring, we conducted a laboratory test on eight healthy male subjects (ages: 22.0 ± 1.25 years). The heart and respiration rates determined by the proposed system correlated significantly with those measured by the contact-type electrocardiogram (r = 0.83, p < 0.01) and respiratory effort belt (r = 0.90, p < 0.01). The results showed that the respiration and heartbeat were accurately detected by the proposed system, which appears promising for monitoring physiological condition in daily life.