FMCW-Radar-Based Vital-Sign Monitoring of Multiple Patients

Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have shown to be suitable for non-contact detection and monitoring of vital signs. Their coherent deramping-based architecture is beneficial in two aspects: i) it permits to attain high-resolution range profiles circumventing the necessity of expensive high-sampling-rate analog-to-digital converters and ii) its coherence feature enables a very-precise phase-based extraction of the range-displacement information. On the other hand, Doppler radars do not possess range resolution, leading to the fact that they can only detect the vital signs of a single patient with conventional base-band spectrum analysis. This work shows that FMCW radars can handle multiple patients located at different range cells. Simulations of vital-sign acquisitions confirm the isolation capabilities of FMCW radars in contrast to conventional Doppler radar systems.