Contactless Estimation of Respiratory and Heart Rate Using Low-Cost 24 GHz CW Radar Systems

This thesis focuses on the use of low-cost commercial 24 GHz single-input single-output continuous-wave radars for the estimation of respiratory and heart rate. The core of the work consists of the development of dedicated hardware to amplify, filter, and sample the analog signals received from the radar modules, as well as the design of a suitable signal processing algorithm for the estimation of these parameters. In addition, the possibility of recovering heart sound information from the radar signals was investigated. Experimental acquisitions were conducted on healthy volunteer subjects to validate the proposed solution. Two different radar modules manufactured by InnoSenT were tested, and the estimation performance was evaluated using standard contact-based measurement devices as reference. The results demonstrate that the proposed system is capable of accurately estimating respiratory and heart rate, achieving performance comparable to that reported in the literature.