Microwave contactless heart rate sensor

Abstract

A heart-rate sensor for detecting artery blood-flow volume per unit length change in a human or animal subject, which comprises an antenna for sensing the instantaneous volume of blood in the artery of the subject, to be measured; a RADAR unit for transmitting microwave signals into a subject's body part or limb representing tissue targets. The output of the RADAR unit includes a superposition of signals each of which corresponding to a different tissue target with amplitudes that relate to the target's reflection strength; a sampling circuitry for converting reflected signals to digital; a window function circuitry for suppressing unwanted spectral sidebands originating from the subsequent processor operating on time truncated data; an FFT processor following the window function circuitry, for splitting the superposition according to its relative frequency into a multiplicity of bins, each of which with an amplitude that represents the reflection magnitude of a target at a specific distance from the antenna; a signal processor for filtering out the effect of the sensor movement with respect to the subject body part, or the movement of the body part, and for generating a signal, the amplitude of which is proportional to the artery varying dilatation representing the heart-rate; a heart-rate estimator for measuring the frequency of the artery dilatation variations and for canceling the interference of the amplitude of any signal that does not originate from the artery; a battery for powering the sensor.