Microwave and millimeter-wave Doppler radar heart sensing

Technology that can be used to unobtrusively detect and monitor the presence of human subjects from a distance and through barriers can be a powerful tool for meeting new security challenges, including asymmetric battlefield threats abroad and defense infrastructure needs back home. Our team is developing mobile remote sensing technology for battle-space awareness and warfighter protection, based on microwave and millimeter-wave Doppler radar motion sensing devices that detect human presence. This technology will help overcome a shortfall of current see-through-the-wall (STTW) systems, which is, the poor detection of stationary personnel. By detecting the minute Doppler shifts induced by a subject's cardiopulmonary related chest motion, the technology will allow users to detect personnel that are completely stationary more effectively. This personnel detection technique can also have an extremely low probability of intercept since the signals used can be those from everyday communications. The software and hardware developments and challenges for personnel detection and count at a distance will be discussed, including a 2.4 GHz quadrature radar single-chip silicon CMOS implementation, a low-power double side-band Ka-band transmission radar, and phase demodulation and heart rate extraction algorithms. In addition, the application of MIMO techniques for determining the number of subjects will be discussed.