Contactless radar-based breathing monitoring of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit

in Scientific Reports (2022), 12(1), 1--15

Vital sign monitoring systems are essential in the care of hospitalized neonates. Due to the immaturity of their organs and immune system, premature infants require continuous monitoring of their vital ... [more ▼]

Vital sign monitoring systems are essential in the care of hospitalized neonates. Due to the immaturity of their organs and immune system, premature infants require continuous monitoring of their vital parameters and sensors need to be directly attached to their fragile skin. Besides mobility restrictions and stress, these sensors often cause skin irritation and may lead to pressure necrosis. In this work, we show that a contactless radar-based approach is viable for breathing monitoring in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). For the first time, different scenarios common to the NICU daily routine are investigated, and the challenges of monitoring in a real clinical setup are addressed through different contributions in the signal processing framework. Rather than just discarding measurements under strong interference, we present a novel random body movement mitigation technique based on the time-frequency decomposition of the recovered signal. In addition, we propose a simple and accurate frequency estimator which explores the harmonic structure of the breathing signal. As a result, the proposed radar-based solution is able to provide reliable breathing frequency estimation, which is close to the reference cabled device values most of the time. Our findings shed light on the strengths and limitations of this technology and lay the foundation for future studies toward a completely contactless solution for vital signs monitoring. [less ▲]

Statistical Performance Analysis of Radar-Based Vital-Sign Processing Techniques

Scientific Conference (2022)

Radar-based vital-sign monitoring provides several advantages over standard methodologies. Despite the huge amount of recent work, the preference for particular technique(s) is in debt, due to lack of a ... [more ▼]

Radar-based vital-sign monitoring provides several advantages over standard methodologies. Despite the huge amount of recent work, the preference for particular technique(s) is in debt, due to lack of a formal comparison between them. In addition, collection of real data is a time-consuming process and therefore most of the proposed solutions are only evaluated under very limited scenarios. In this paper we present a simulation framework and a selection of results which allow easy performance comparison between radar-based vital-sign processing techniques. The proposed simulation tool scans over multiple breathing and heartbeat frequencies, and the combined effects along the entire signal processing chain can be analyzed, for different combinations of scenarios and techniques. The results have shown specific limitations for each method, thus indicating a need for proper selection based on operating conditions. In addition, while breathing estimation performance is only limited by noise, heartbeat estimation is limited by the presence of breathing harmonics and, despite promising results at specific breathing/heartbeat frequencies, the presented methods fail to fully mitigate this type of interference in all scenarios. [less ▲]