The design of a robust and intelligent phased array Non-Contact Vital Signs (NCVS) sensor system
For the past few years, it has been the desire of the healthcare industry to have a non-invasive system capable of continuous, accurate, and long-term monitoring of human vital signs. Having a system that can measure and record vital signs, such as heart rates and respiration rates, is an invaluable tool for physicians who need to make rapid life-and-death decisions. Such a system would also be an effective tool to help physicians make better informed decisions when viewing a patient’s long-term monitored data. Therefore, there has been a large increase in research activities to develop a system that can monitor a patient’s vital signs and quickly transmit the information to healthcare professionals. Non-contact vital signs (NCVS) monitoring system are particularly attractive for long term vital signs monitoring because there are no wires, electrodes, wearable devices, nor contact-based sensors for the subjects to worry about. In this thesis we will investigate improvements made to an existing Doppler-based non-contact vital signs (NCVS) biosensor we have built in Professor Donald Y. C. Lie’s RF/Analog SoC Lab. The main focus of this thesis will be on improving the effective range of the system and the creation of a “smart” system capable of detecting a patient’s location and movement. To determine the accuracy of the NCVS sensor, the heart rate measurements from the system are compared against an external contact-based piezoelectric finger sensor as a reference. In previous works, the NCVS sensor performance was tested within a clutter-free anechoic chamber inside Dr. Lie’s RF/Analog SoC Lab. In this work, to examine the performance of the NCVS sensor in a more practical setting, all tests were performed within the typical Herman-Miller type office cubicle setting, inside a section of the RF/Analog SoC Lab. Additionally, I will detail the 5th and 6th generation revisions and improvement to the NCVS sensor.
Beam-Steering, Doppler Radar, Non-Contact Vital Signs Monitoring, Phased Array, Telemedicine
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