Multibeam Doppler Sensor-Based Non-Contact Heartbeat Detection Using Beam Diversity

Heartbeat detection could enable various applications in the medical and health care fields. In particular, non-contact heartbeat detection can be acceptable for those who have difficulty wearing devices, such as burn patients and infants. A Doppler sensor could be a key device to realize heartbeat detection without any wearable devices. Many researches in recent years have focused on heartbeat detection using a Doppler sensor with a single beam Doppler sensor. However, when the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of heartbeat components is low for the beam direction, the heartbeat detection accuracy is likely to degrade. In this paper, for more accurate heartbeat detection, we propose a heartbeat detection method based on beam diversity using a multibeam Doppler sensor. Through the preliminary experiments, we clarified that the SNRs of heartbeat components differ from one beam to another. This means that when the SNR is low for one beam, the SNR could be high for the other beams. Inspired by this fact, the proposed method extracts heartbeat components from all peaks detected by the multi-beam signals. To verify the heartbeat detection accuracy of our method, we conducted the experiments for different detection ranges. The obtained results show that compared to the conventional methods using a single beam, our proposed method using multibeam detected heartbeat more accurately. This indicates the benefit of exploiting beam diversity, i.e., the heartbeat detection accuracy can be improved by utilizing beam diversity.