Contact-free monitoring of human vital signs via a

microwave sensor
Guohua Lu, Fang Yang,Xijing Jing,Xiao Yu, Hua Zhang, Huijun Xue,Jianqi Wang
Department of Electronics
Fourth Military Medical University
Xian,710032, China
lugh1976@fmmu.edu.cn
AbstractHuman vital signs such as heart rate and breathing
rate are widely used to assess the health state of human in
clinic. Tranditional method uses eletrodes or sensors touching
the body to measure electrocardiography (ECG) and
respiratory signals.A vital signs monitor via a micorwave
sensor was disscused to contact-free measurement of the heart
rate and breathing rate. Comparison of vital signs derived
from the microwave sensor and tranditional contact monitor
demonstrated that there were no significant differences
between each other, which suggested the contact-free vital
signs monitor may prove a practical alternative method to
measure heart rate and breathing rate.
Keywords-vital signs; microwave sensor;contact-free

I.

INTRODUCTION

Heart rates and breathing rates are attractive and have

the potential to be useful in various clinical settings.Heart
rates can be determined by electrocardiography (ECG)
recordings using three Ag/AgCl electrodes attached to
specific anatomical positions, in accordance with Einthoven.
Breathing rates can be determined by respiration sensor
around a humans chest or abdomen. However, none of these
monitors are truly noninvasive, as they all require that the
sensor be physically attached to human body surface. This
may limit their usefulness, particularly in sick premature
neonates and seriously burned patients.
Contact-free measurement of vital signs via a microwave
sensor is a new technique, which can penetrate some nonmetal media like wood, clothes and remotely sense the
respiration and heartbeat signals without any electrodes or
sensors touching the body of human subjects [1-10].
The work described in the paper was aimed at evaluating
the use of a microwave sensor for measuring the vital signs
including heart rates and breathing rates in healthy subjects.
Here we show under controlled research conditions that
measures of heart rates and breathing rates derived from the
tranditional contact methods and the microwave sensor are
similar by comparing 5-minute data segments.
II.

DESCRIPTION OF THE MICROWAVE SENSOR

The block scheme of the custom-developed contact-free

microwave sensor is shown in Figure 1. The microwave

wave was generated by the oscillator via a directional

coupler. The oscillator, made of a GaAs Gunn diode was
chosen to meet the demands of low noise and low cost, can
also provide linear continuous waves. The oscillator operated
at 24 GHz and the maximum transmission power was about
7 mW. The microwave beams were radiated through a twoway parabolic antenna via a circulator. The gain of the
antenna is 24 dB, and the beam width is 12 degree. Another
signal from the directional coupler acted as a local
oscillatory signal for the receiver. The echo signal was
received by the antenna and then passed through the
circulator to get into the mixer where it was mixed with the
local oscillatory signal. The output of the mixer was
conditioned by a signal conditioner, composed of an
amplifier with the gain of 60 dB, an analog low-pass filter
with cutoff frequency of 0.5 Hz, an analog band- pass filter
with lower cutoff frequency of 0.7 Hz and the upper cutoff
frequency of 5.0 Hz, and a 50 Hz notch filter. The custom
developed rechargeable power supply could provide 5 Volt
up to 5 Amp Hours and the power consumption of the
microwave sensor was less than 3 Watts. Thus the sensor
could continuously work over 8 hours after the lithium
batteries were fully recharged. The outputs of the signal
conditioner were called heartbeat and brathing signals.
Circulator
Directional
coupler

Oscillator

Signal
conditioner
Figure 1. The block scheme of the microwave sensor.

III.

SIGNAL RECORDING AND ANALYSING

For recording of the electrocardiogram, disposable

Ag/AgCl resting ECG electrodes (Red Dot-2352; 3M
Company; MN, USA) were attached to the lower of left

978-1-4244-5089-3/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

A. Calculation of heart rate and breathing rate

Three 5-minute segments derived from the microwave
sensor ,ECG and respiration sensor were selected by an
experienced researcher. Power spectra of the selected
segments were obtained by Welchs method into 50%
overlapping sections. A Hamming window of 1024 data
points was used to reduce the variance of the resulting
spectra estimate. The heart rate and breathing rate were
calculated by the frequency occurrence of the peak of the
spectra time sixty. The average of the three heart rates and
breathing rates was used to analyze the relationship between
the microwave sendor and BIOPAC System.
B. Statistical analysis
To assess how similar vital signs derived from the
microwave sensor with those d from the BIOPAC System,
correlation analysis was performed. Before analyses, raw
values of all variables were examined for deviations from
normality by the KolmogorovSmirnov test. Statistical
analysis was performed in SPSS@ (v13, SPSS Inc.; Chicago,
IL, USA) and graphs were plotted using Origin@ (v7.5776,
Northampton, MA, USA).The level of significance was set at
p < 0.05 (two-tailed).
IV.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In order to compare the difference between the vital

signs extracted from micorwave sensor and Biopac system
recordings, the linear regression analysis is used. The results
are showed in Fig.2. and Fig.3.. The horizontal ordinates
expresse the breathing rate and heart rate derived from
Biopac system,respectively.And the vertical ordinates
demonstrate the breathing rate and heart rate derived from
the microwave sensor.Both of the figures showed there is

strong correlation between the vital signs from the

microwave sensor and the trandional contact recording
system,i.e. the vital signs are similar with each other, which
suggested the contact-free vital signs monitor via a
microwave sensor may prove a practical alternative method
to measure heart rate and breathing rate.

Breathing rate (Beat/min)

22

20

18

16

14

12
12

14

16

18

20

22

Breathing rate (Beat/min)

Figure 2. Correlation between the breathing rates derived from

microwave sensor and respiration sensor. Solid line=linear regression,
Outer dashed line=upper and lower 95% confidence intervals. (2=0.92,
p<0.0001, n=16).
90
85

Heart rate (Beat/min)

chest (Ground), upper of right chest (Negative) and the

upper of left chest (Positive). Wires from the electrodes
(LEAD108A;BIOPAC Systems Inc.; Goleta, CA, USA)
were attached to the ECG amplifier (ECG100C; BIOPAC
Systems Inc.). For recording of the respiratory signal, the
respiration sensor (TSD201; BIOPAC Systems Inc.) around
the chest surface connected to the respiration
amplifier(RSP100C; BIOPAC Systems Inc.).
Outputs of ECG100C, RSP100C and the microwave
sensor were connected to a 16-channel A/D converter
(MP150; BIOPAC Systems Inc.), which was in turn directly
connected to a desktop computer through a 10M / 100Mbps
Ethernet adapter. All the signals were sampled at a frequency
of 1000 Hz simultaneously recorded for 20 minutes using the
AcqKnowledge software package (v3.8.1; BIOPAC Systems
Inc.) and saved to a text file for further processing.
Sixteen volunteers (16 males; 23.0 4.0 years (mean
S.D.)) participated in this study. Ethic Committee of the
Fourth Military Medical University approved the study. All
subjects were healthy and informed consent was obtained
prior to their participation. Subjects sat on a chair and
remained still throughout the recording period when they
were instructed to minimize their movement. The distance
between the subject and the microwave sensor was 3.6 m.

80
75
70
65
60
60

65

70

75

80

85

90

Heart rate (Beat/min)

Figure 3. Correlation between the heart rate derived from microwave

sensor and ECG recordings. Solid line=linear regression, Outer dashed
line=upper and lower 95% confidence intervals. (2=0.95, p<0.0001, n=16).

However,in the contact-free healthcare monitor via a

microwave sensor, one of the key problems is how to
accurately get the heart rate, which will provide important
health information of the subject to doctors or nurses. In
good conditions while the subject keeps still during the
recording, heart beat signals can be easily identified by
common analog and digital filters by a band pass filter with
lower cutoff frequency of 0.8Hz and upper cutoff frequency
of 2.5Hz [11]. But it is very difficult to detect the heartbeat
due to the effects of strong breathing and involuntary bodysurface movements of subjects.There are two reasons, one is
the minute chest movement caused by the respiration is
much stronger than that caused by the heartbeat, the other
one is the high order of the harmonics component of

respiration is overlapped with that of the heartbeat, thus it is

difficult to separate the heartbeat signal from the overlapped
signals using the simple analog or digital filter. Adaptive
filter might be used to reduce the impacts of the interferences
above on the heart beat recorded from the microwace sensor
.
Here we showed heart rate and breathing rate can be
remotely monitored without any electrodes and sensors
touching the subject, which will make the subject feel
relaxed and comfortable. Vital signs monitor made from this
technology can be widely used in clinic, such as seriously
burned patients, infectious disorders patients and new-born
baby , as well it can be used in the filed of psychophysiology
study.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the General Department of
Logistics of the PLA, China (No. 10KS01) and Shaanxi
Technology Committee (No. 2010K01-204).

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