Heartbeat information prediction based on transformer model using millimetre-wave radar

Millimetre-wave radar offers high ranging accuracy and can capture subtle vibration information of the human heart. This study proposes a heartbeat prediction method based on the transformer model using millimetre-wave radar. Firstly, the millimetre-wave radar was used to collect the heartbeat data and conduct normalisation processing. Secondly, a position coding was introduced to assign sine or cosine variables to input data and extract their relative position relationship. Subsequently, the transformer encoder was adopted to allocate attention to input data through the multi-head attention mechanism, using a mask layer before the decoding layer to prevent the leakage of future information. Finally, we employ the fully connected layer was employed in the linear decoder for regression and output the predicted results. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed transformer model achieves nearly 30% higher prediction accuracy than traditional long short-term memory models while improving both the prediction accuracy and convergence rate. The proposed method has great potential in predicting the heartbeat state of elderly and sick patients.