Vital Sign Radar : Development of a Compact, Highly Integrated 60GHz FMCW Radar for Human Vital Sign Monitoring

Sammanfattning: Supervision of human vital signs has always been an essential part in healthcare. Nowadays there is a strong interest in contact-less monitoring methods as they operate less static and offer higher flexibility to the people observed. Recent industrial development enabled radar functionality to be packed in single-chip solutions, decreasing application complexity and speeding up designs. Within this thesis, a vital sign radar prototype has been developed utilising a recently released 60GHz frequency modulated continous wave single-chip radar. The electronics development has been focused on compactness and high system integration. Special attention has been given to the onboard analogue signal filtering and digital data preprocessing. The resulting prototype radar is then tested and evaluated using test scenarios with increasing difficulty. The final experiments prove that the radar is capable of tracking human respiration rate and heartbeat simultaneously from a distance of 1m. It can be concluded that modern radar devices may be significantly miniaturised for e.g. portable operation while offering a wide variety of application possibilities including vital sign monitoring.