A Robust and Accurate FMCW MIMO Radar Vital Sign Monitoring Framework With 4-D Cardiac Beamformer and Heart-Rate Trace Carving Technique

This article presents a framework for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar vital sign monitoring to achieve accurate heart rate (HR) in home application scenarios and low SNR environments. The framework consists of two main parts. The first part includes a 4-D cardiac beamformer, which is a beamformer composed of the distance dimension, azimuth and zenith angles, and the time-frequency dimension. A novel time-domain FMCW radar interference-resistant (IR) phase extraction method is proposed and combined with a spectrum-based cardiac signal quality evaluation model, ultimately focusing the radar array beams on the position of the human heart. The second part involves a modified adaptive HR trace carving technique. This technique involves the analysis of the time-frequency domain vital sign signal, utilizing forward accumulation and backward propagation to reconstruct faint heartbeat trajectory information concealed beneath respiratory harmonics and noise. To validate the proposed framework, a K-band 2T4R FMCW MIMO radar prototype was designed and fabricated. In a total of 20 overnight sleep experiments, the overall RMSE of respiratory rate and HR estimation obtained by the radar prototype based on the proposed framework were 0.53 and 2.68 bpm, respectively. The proposed framework demonstrates robust IR and the capability to operate in extremely low SNR conditions, which holds significant potential in long-term vital sign monitoring applications.